set fire to the rain
by Missy Jade
Summary: 'The Green Eyes, they believed that life always comes from death.' He has lost everything, all of his terror had been for nothing in the end. arnoldhelga, future-fic, background character death
1. prologue

_arnold/helga, assorted including gerald/phoebe  
mature (__background character death, violence, adult concepts, language, sexual content_)  
_future-fic, spoilers through tjm, takes place in the 'the fire in your heart is out' universe, title from adele (duh)_  
'The Green Eyes, they believed that life always comes from death.' He has lost everything, all of his terror had been for nothing in the end.

* * *

**prologue—**

_The bow is missing now._

_Sitting in front of him, face mashed to the bus window as she sleeps and they speed down the street, the blonde girl had at some point traded the old pink bow for a blue knit hat that she's got rolled down over her eyes right now. Phoebe's doing something beside her and the small girl's body language is unmistakable, a silent warning to let her closest friend get whatever sleep she can get during the ride._

_Arnold watches it the way he has for the last two months._

_And as always Helga is stirring as they take the last turn before the school, reaching up to push the hat off her face and mutter something tired in Phoebe's direction. "… can go later," is all Arnold can make out of the response and then Helga shrugs, pushing to her feet as the bus lurches to a stop._

_After a long time (only a nervous awful moment), Arnold follows her at a distance._

* * *

Twenty-eight, and he's felt ancient so long he's stopped caring about the feeling.

But he feels absurdly young now, pulse jumping oddly under his skin as he searches the chaos of his room for Phoebe's number and it takes fifteen minutes, a full fifteen minutes, to remember that she lives with Gerald, she lives with her _husband_, and that Gerald is the first of his speed dials.

It rings and rings, rings some more and then snaps rudely into his friend's voice mail.

Arnold flings the phone down onto the desk and takes a circuit around his bedroom before he grabs the phone off his bed, smashing out of his room and down the hall.

It's as overly warm as it always is, sweat beading under his shirt already, and he's got the keys in the ignition before his car door closes, is pulling into the street moments later. Gerald's number is pulled up again, the connection made and then broken when the result is the same, and he throws the phone into the seat beside him, rubbing at his face as he tries to remember the way to the hospital.

His phone buzzes a good minute later and he grabs it immediately, heart jumping into his throat and almost answering before he sees MOM emblazoned across the small screen.

There's the familiar thought (_I don't want to talk to you_) but he's long since stopped guilty.

("I know you can make better progress than this," and Dr. King is staring at him with an almost-hidden hint of sadness in her gaze, all that she can do long since done and losing faith herself.)

He rejects the call without a second thought, and tosses the phone away again.

His eyes ache, the clock on the dashboard blinking to 3:28, and the night is oddly quiet.

But Arnold blinks the moisture away, and finally remembers to turn on his headlights.

* * *

_His parents haven't left the States in a good five years._

_Somehow the anniversary of their final homecoming just leaves him more lethargic, more tired._

_They live with him now, fitting into the boarding house as well as he will let them, and they have not left his side and he's becoming tired, he thinks, of _waiting_ for them to leave his side._

_Thanksgiving, Christmas, a dozen holidays he wishes to be alone during these days._

_Easier, less stressful, quieter, and they will not allow him to have it._

_They love him too much, even more than the research they cannot force themselves to pack up, but they also stay with him because of guilt and fear and a nagging worry they cannot disregard._

_They show him even now everything they have pieced together, so many discoveries that have them slipping off to panels and conferences every couple of years, and he cannot be bothered._

_His old hat is somewhere in a corner, untouched since he'd tossed it away years before._

_Arnold doesn't remember where._

* * *

Gerald finds a way to get him in the third day he's camped out in the waiting room.

He says only, "Come on, just do it" when Arnold glances at him in surprise and half-yanks the startled man beginning to stink in the jeans and shirt down the hall to room where Helga's still unconscious. "You have to be fast," the man orders, something tight and unhappy on his face, "fast, okay, but I can't just…" An odd hesitation then, Gerald's eyes murky and dark in a way Arnold's never seen, and then Arnold's shoved through the door with one last, "Make it count, man."

But Arnold's already lost interest in him, eyes snapping immediately to the figure tucked away into the white sheets, the beeping of the monitors a terrifying _wonderful_ thing.

They'd seen each other at the wedding a few years before and he remembers starkly the dress she'd been shoved into, how the atrocious nest of tulle around her knees had left him almost teary-eyed with laughter (she'd looked so _traumatized_ by the get-up) but she'd looked healthy, not happy but at least healthy.

She'd never looked at him once, and he hadn't attempted to even catch her gaze.

Other than that, other than those few hours in the same building, he hasn't seen her in nearly a decade.

Even being sure of what he'd been expecting, even knowing his weakness, he is devastated.

A nervous step, blind already, and then he's bent over her and pressing his lips to her hair, open palms hovering over her but afraid to settle, to touch, to do more damage to her body. "I can't," his lips brand into her hair, and he's sharply aware of how oddly strong his own voice sounds. Because that part of him is long gone but familiar, and he repeats the same words as he leans his weight carefully into the bed, finally smooths hair compulsively back and kisses her forehead, her cheek.

He doesn't want to know what she'd looked like two days ago but his nearly dead imagination flutters to life briefly, fills his mind with a half-dozen images that he knows are terrifyingly close.

"I can't say it," he admits, salt on his tongue as he touches her hand where a needle doesn't pierce, "I can't say it, Helga," and his hand drifts up to press against her chest, and he can feel the life pounding in her, shockingly strong despite the damage and— "I can't say it, but you know, I know you know—"

"Come on," and if Gerald sounds close to tears himself, it doesn't matter. Arnold doesn't know when he'd come in and then realizes that his friend might not have even left, and the thin fabric of the hospital gown wrinkles in his fist as he kisses her face again— and then he's laughing dully, stupidly, as Gerald pulls him away with a smothered noise of emotion, his own grief unmistakable.

"Jesus," Arnold hears, and then, "Jesus, man, I can't do this if you lose it now," and Arnold's laughing so hard he crashes into Gerald as they walk fast the way they'd come, his friend keeping him going.

"Our third kiss," Arnold manages past the increasingly rough laughter, and Gerald doesn't let him go. "What if we go too fast?" he cracks, and then, laughter splintering, heart torn to pieces inside of him: "I couldn't even say it now."

Jolting movement beside him, a snap of pressure on his arm, and Gerald's got him in a tight grip, the strength in his arms a stark promise of how badly rattled he is by Arnold's state. There is a long awful silence beyond Arnold's ragged noises and Gerald stands strong, and it is the first time Arnold has let himself be touched in too long for him to remember, he doesn't even _like_ to be touched now—

"It's okay," Gerald promises him in a rough voice, "it's okay, you'll tell her soon, I promise."

* * *

_Helga makes manager at the job she likes, and happily quits the job she hates._

_To the surprise of no one but herself, she is frighteningly good at it._

_She stays there as she completes her AA and her BA, and is promoted again as she works on her Masters._

_Gerald brings it up once by accident one night when he brings a six pack (Arnold hates leaving the boarding house, and does it less and less, and even Gerald's stopped trying to get him out) and take-out and plays along with Arnold's carefully laid out emotional system._

_"Phoebe's mother brags about her to everybody, can you believe that?"_

_There is a squeezing pressure inside Arnold, the familiar sensation that makes him want to bury himself deeper, and he stares carefully up at the night sky through the window of his old room and the paint smell never leaves now, colors flowing across the walls even in the dark._

_Love shouldn't be so devastating, he thinks, and Gerald's gone silent, apparently realizing what he's just said and that it crosses the line that Arnold's never been able to define over so many years._

_And he doesn't even know how many years now, doesn't know where one phase of his life ended and another began, doesn't remember when Helga wasn't some _weight_ in his life. Crushing him or anchoring him, it doesn't matter, because she does both so well that the long dead idealist in him only feels small and helpless in the face of the truth that she must have been born to do it._

_"You could call her."_

_Gerald's voice is careful and light— and the stars that spread above them line up perfectly with the ones that Arnold had grown up with, are the very same that they were twenty plus years before._

_"I could," Arnold admits, and studies the stars as if they will change if he does not watch them._

* * *

Gerald— he knows it is Gerald— touches his arm, squeezes his shoulder.

Arnold wakes up facing the door of the waiting room, back strung tight after too many hours unmoving from his seat, and spends a few moments gazing at the door instead of Gerald.

"Arnold," he hears, and he closes his eyes tightly as Gerald crouches in front of him.

Because he can hear that his best friend's breathing is uneven, and knows that his eyes are red-rimmed and puffy, that his expression is uncertain and desperate. "Arnold, you gotta look at me—" and then he falls silent when Arnold does, his own eyes dropping to stare at his shoes, jaw tight.

"What?" His voice is thick already, something wild simmering beneath the word. "_What_?" he is half-demanding, and there is a stark moment of clarity, a sharp realization: he had not even known that he's already spent the last ten years _mourning_ her as if she'd already been lost to him—

"They don't know what happened, they ran her into surgery but—"

He has spent the last ten years mourning— no, longer than that, a lifetime spent grieving for parents and then grandparents, and he doesn't know when he had begun to mourn for Helga and then doesn't know if it was only Helga he had been mourning, left wildly unsteady by the ugly suspicion that he has been mourning his life, their life, and someone is breathing heavily, beginning to hyperventilate—

"Oh shit," and then "_shit_" as if Gerald is suddenly terrified, his hands grabbing Arnold in an attempt to stabilize the man, and beyond him Arnold can see Phoebe and her mother just outside the waiting room, clinging to one another as if struggling to brave a storm.

There is a noise building in the air, a low frantic sound that should not come from a human throat, and Arnold has long since been swept away, not even Gerald strong enough to hold him, by the time the noise crests.

* * *

_an: nope, not saying nothing._


	2. one

**one_—_**

Grown, struggling and succeeding almost completely by herself even with the constant offered help by the foster family that had built themselves around her, Helga had lived her own life.

There are no pictures on the walls, no television in the main room, no knickknacks on the shelves.

Arnold searches the little house she had been so proud of after the memorial without much thought, only sure that he is trying to find something he has no words for, and finds only pieces of a puzzle.

The food bowl of the same dog currently curled up miserable and alone on the still unmade twin bed sitting in the kitchen; piles of textbooks stacked on the desk with a still-open notebook, an ancient laptop charged and sitting nearby to be used by a woman who will not return; an mp3 player sitting by a basket of unfolded laundry, white and pink ear buds tangled on top.

When he presses a button, it lights up and he finds Fleetwood Mac paused mid-song. When he skips forward a few times, curiosity dull and heavy and unfamiliar in his chest, he finds Bob Dylan and some truly godawful heavy metal band that he _hates_ next in the list of musical selections.

Only Helga, and he can only barely force himself to put it down and continue on his way.

A worn pink towel hanging by the shower, half-empty soap bottles sitting inside, and he slips back out of the bathroom after only a moment, feeling uncomfortable and too much like an intruder.

Arnold opens the walk-in closet and finds one half only partially filled with clothes and a couple of pairs of shoes; he glances at the other side and blinks at the wall of yarn, so thoroughly confused (and mildly frightened) by the sight that he steps right back out of the closet and closes it behind him.

In the little nightstand by her bed, he finally finds an old picture envelope hidden behind a half-empty bottle of lotion and another little ball of yarn with tiny (and incredibly painfully sharp) little needles sticking out, and doesn't think twice. The dog ignores him when he eases down onto the mattress beside her, more focused on waiting for her owner than caring what the bunch of humans were doing while she was out (after all the dog knew all the others intimately), and Arnold searches the pictures.

Phoebe from middle and high school; Gerald and Phoebe's prom picture, and Phoebe standing with her parents, proud and smiling in her graduation gown; Olga, Phoebe, Olga; Gerald and Phoebe together on the steps of a church, and then Phoebe in the hospital with the newborn baby snuggled contently in her arms; Olga, Olga, Olga, Olga… and if these shots seem odd, the blonde woman's face increasingly sad in the last handful of pictures, he doesn't think much of it.

Because there are none of _Helga_ and for a moment Arnold hates her, despises her, wants to _hurt_ her for leaving him nothing and it's stupid since Phoebe and Gerald have already promised to give him copies of everything they have, not just the pictures but also the family movies she drifts through like a ghost, and none of it matters as he drops the pictures on the nightstand tiredly.

Another wave of emotion, a slow building crush barely held back and he drops his head into his hands as he tries to breath, sits and shakes and smells her in the room she's left behind.

(and he'd snuck into her room in the boarding house every few nights after she'd left until her scent had vanished and no one has been allowed to have that one since, and not even Gerald knows it.)

He can hear their voices in the kitchen area, and digs the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Shudders and struggles to keep his breathing steady.

Movement behind him, a subtle shift before something bumps his back and he looks over his shoulder with burning eyes, finds Helga's dog gazing up at him, her expression flat and forlorn.

The tag on the light pink collar reads "Betsy".

Arnold pats her on the head and then doesn't quite know what else to do with her.

It isn't too much of a problem a moment later, Phoebe gazing at him quietly from the small hallway and looking impossibly small in her black dress and cardigan.

"Olga brought her for her a few years ago," she explains, and he swallows, doesn't know why the idea tugs at him so oddly. "She complained about her from day one but we all knew better… you should have seen her the first time she was sick, I haven't seen her so upset since_—_"

Sudden silence, Phoebe's eyes shifting quickly away, something dark and angry creasing her mouth for a moment, and he tenses uncomfortably, eyes dropping back down to the dog.

_Since you left us for your parents, since you gave us up for San Lorenzo and then showed up and acted betrayed that we had managed to get along just fine without you…_

Arnold has never kidded himself when it comes to the feelings of the few friends he still has, knows in that awful hollow inside what loss had finally caused Helga to learn to hope for nothing from no one.

Betsy stares up at him, sad and impossibly aware, and he knows that Helga must have curled up with her for so many years through long nights— and then his arms encircle the dog's neck, body bending as he curls tightly around her on the same bed.

His own breathing sounds harsh in the silence of Helga's bedroom.

Phoebe says, "Arnold…" in a tear-thick voice and then nothing else, and he does not look at her again.

* * *

_Dr. King could retire off him._

_Her short brown hair shot through with gray, glasses always perched on her nose, she looks startlingly rough the morning he shows up without an appointment and accepts him without question._

_"How are you doing?" is skipped, as well as "did she suffer?" and "would you like to talk?"_

_Each question would be as useless as the next, and he sits dull and tired on her couch, eyes locked on the wall above and behind her head as he struggles and fails and struggles more to simply speak._

_"You haven't slept since the hospital," she doesn't even pretend to ask and he only sighs silently, head tilting back to gaze up at the ceiling instead, unwilling and unable to even lie to her._

_Instead Arnold lies at home in his bed avoiding his parents and the few people that are calling him constantly, helpless and useless in his mourning as two days pass and time does not restart. _

_"When is her—?" Dr. King starts and then stops at once when his voice escapes, small and helpless:_

_"I wanted her to know," he begins to say before an aching moment's hesitation, before he then continues, defeated and powerless and harshly honest, "I couldn't even…"_

_The new awful weight sits inside him, crushing pieces of him into dust._

_"What were you going to tell her?" the doctor asks quietly, curiously emotional as she gazes at him._

_But Arnold says nothing, eyes focused blindly on something only he can see until he breathes out and closes his eyes, remembers things that will not happen because he has left that man behind, because he has risked too many things and even certain things, now, create nothing but panic inside._

_"Arnold."_

_"I was already grieving," and the words burst out of him like an old confession, his voice splintering but somehow staying strong as he admits what he can no longer ignore. "I don't even know when I started and everything feels concrete now, like I built a sandcastle and thought it was gone but it was just sitting there until I _stepped_ on it—"_

_He is crying, sharp awful noises ugly in the silence, and the window of the doctor's office overlooks a promise of rain that rolls across the sky and it seems there's so little rain on this coast these days, so little anywhere, only endless storms that light the sky and fade away into the night—_

_He cannot stop crying and rain splashes against the glass, thunder trembling far in the distance._

_And the rain passes but the storm does not, is still rolling above him when he drives alone to the small chapel early the next morning after his third sleepless night._

* * *

Phoebe does not bother him again.

No one does.

So Arnold sleeps in Helga's cold bed on top of her sheets, Betsy comfortable against his side.

When he wakes so many hours late (close to morning, actually, and he cannot feel guilt past the weight) he does not touch the contents of her fridge or her cabinets, only searches long enough to find the dog food before he goes back to his nameless search for what he can't possibly explain.

His jacket is tossed aside within the hour, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up almost an hour after that, and he goes through her closet like a living ghost, wide awake and calmer than he's been in—

Arnold does not remember.

Sneakers and sandals, no heels (he's only vaguely aware that the grimace on his face is close to a smile) and no skirts, only a small handful of summer dresses, bright blues and pinks and two in black, the last still with their price tags attached, unworn date dresses purchased and then tucked away. The rest of her clothes are made up of sleeveless tops and old band shirts and hoodies of all colors that hang close to the door of the closet, easier to grab when she'd been rushing out the door.

A box of hats is stacked above, and a search through them has him struggling for a moment, fingers closing spastically around the old knit hat she'd worn for years (to at least partially hide the old pigtails she'd struggled so hard to finally get rid of in their senior year, he knows now). Under that more hats and he finds one made with intricate designs and ones worn so roughly they'd developed holes— no, not developed holes, there were holes in the hats and now he glances curiously over his shoulder at the wall of yarn he'd been so confused by the night before, stares at it thoughtfully.

When he starts to search that side he finds plastic drawer units set side by side beneath the yarn, two filled to the brim with long needles and long hooks and far too many little organizers full of things that just leave him confused and curious at the same time, having no idea what she'd been doing with them but left a little fascinated. In another drawer are wooden hoops of all sizes and little balls of thick thread; when he opens a few he finds pictures drawn out in sharp little stitches, buses and buildings and a dozen images he's almost forgotten from their childhood.

Their old neighborhood, mapped out perfectly in cross-stitch.

The third is filled with a rainbow of folded fabric, and now he sees stacked on top of those drawers an old sewing machine, most of the text on the plastic worn off but lovingly cared for.

The fourth drawer is enough to make him hesitate, this one tucked against the far wall and, he notices as he crouches to study it warily, papered inside to hide whatever it holds.

He hesitates for the first time, hands reaching out to touch the cold plastic only to still as he considers her effort at privacy in a home she'd shared with only her dog. He studies the last unit of drawers hard for a long time, just able to make out what looks like books and papers past the edge of the scrapbook paper that blocks the contents from his view, and is decided.

Swallowing emotion he turns his gaze back to the yarn, some of which he can now see is still on needles or attached to hooks, tucked away into worn Ziploc bags and, some of them, labeled clumsily.

"cot/lin, neck, circ 6," one reads and he wishes she were with him just to explain what the hell that means because he's curious even if he feels like he's just walked into her private crazy land.

But—

But.

There is something right in this corner, something alive and _her_ in the chaos of her creation, and he leans back against the wall of the closet, takes the feel of her in as if he can make this last.

It aches, that she had hidden these things away, and this pain is enough to swallow him for a moment, enough to leave him sliding down the wall to find some semblance of control, some stability.

There is none.

Only the weight that will not leave and a growing jagged agony beneath even that—

Betsy is barking, the sound hopeful and a little happier, and by the time he's lifted his head tiredly to blink dumbly into the light of Helga's bedroom, Phoebe's gaze flutters from him to that hidden corner and then back again. Her expression is hostile for a moment, savage and vicious as a mother bear until she blinks, shifts and seems to calm. "You didn't—"

"I didn't," he manages past the pain and she looks confused now, awkward and unsure as she shifts from one foot to the other, looks down at the black coat folded over one arm. "You could have—" Hesitation, Phoebe seemingly struggling with the words before she closes her eyes and takes a brave breath, lets it out as if she's decided something. "You could have," she starts again, and the strength in her voice almost makes him envy her, "she— she wanted you to have it if anything ever—"

"She had a will," he starts, and she nods, and he's still crouched miserably against the wall, grief overwhelming as he glances at the plastic drawers she'd done such a careful job of hiding.

"She got it after Olga—"

Silence, again, and he remembers Olga in the pictures and keeps his mouth carefully shut.

"I heard about Miriam," he says slowly and she nods carefully, mouth tightening as she stares silently at her own shoes. He remembers hearing about the cancer a few years before, remembers the sharp need to call Helga, to contact her somehow, to go by her job and just… say something. (Touch her hand and nod along with the lie when she insisted that she didn't care, and be there later when the lie inevitably came apart beneath the strain.) And he remembers that he hadn't, that he'd stayed quiet for a week, a month, and that the ugly shame in him had just festered as the time kept slipping by. "I didn't know about Olga, when— when did she—?"

Her mother and then her sister, and he hadn't even known about Olga.

Gerald had to have known, and he hadn't said anything, and Arnold isn't stupid enough to be angry.

"She, ah—" Something awkward and uncomfortable darkens Phoebe's voice, her face. "Last year."

She says nothing else and something wavers inside him, uncertainty causing him to glance over the last drawer, study it for long seconds as he tries not to process Phoebe's unease. He half wants to ask "why me?" but asking that, he knows, would be too blind even for him, even now. Instead:

"What is it?"

Phoebe only stares at him, expression purposely vague, and he presses his palms against his face for a moment, then pushes himself up to wobble two steps and drop back down in front of the drawers.

Fingers hovering over the plastic, unwilling to touch: "I wish she'd hated me."

An awful moment of silence, Phoebe's voice unforgiving if not cruel: "So do I."

* * *

_He treasures the memories of Helga's joy._

_He remembers the rougher moments perfectly, had memorized them through the years because they are moments _with_ Helga, but there are a handful of memories that shine brighter than any others, that are tucked close to his heart even years later as he grieves for a life unlived in a boarding house he is becoming too terrified to even leave to go shopping._

_She had looked almost her age those moments, weightless and fully alive all at once, not afraid or angry to a degree that, in hindsight, no child should be._

_And he remembers all of them, every single one, from the first day he'd seen her to the last, too brief periods that were bright enough to outshine even her awful struggle of a childhood. Kindergarten, surrounded by blocks that she'd managed to grab before anybody else could get them and once she'd frightened away the rest of the kids, she'd played without shame in her own little corner, and he remembers watching her silently, unable to look away. And third grade, when she and Phoebe would be playing alone for a few minutes by themselves reading in their own little corner, Helga's laughter escaping after Phoebe would whisper something with large eyes and an overly innocent expression as she pointed down at the book open between them._

_Arnold remembers her in the pool in the dress he'd liked (he remembers the exact shade of light brown and she'd felt warm and strong and fearless in his arms and he wishes he could restart his life from his childhood, be as brave as she was and do it all again, do everything right even though there is no right), her hair flattened to her skull as she'd peered up at him in the moment before she'd dragged him so easily down with her. He remembers her laughter when his head had broken the surface, the delight in it as she'd splashed at him shamelessly, nothing seemingly lurking behind her eyes as she'd laughed not at him but because she'd been _enjoying_ herself._

_And, god, the joy it caused in him, Helga happy for just a few minutes, really _happy.

_And he remembers the laughter that had bubbled up inside himself for just a moment, the instinct he'd fought down to lunge at her and splash her right back, to make her little bit of laughter grow, hit that pitch he was always waiting to hear, hoping to hear, never heard enough._

_And the moment had been ruined a heartbeat later, Helga shrieking and exploding away from him, and he remembers the way his heart had trembled a little in his chest before he'd realized she'd been more surprised than anything else, and then he'd been mad at himself, privately embarrassed._

_And he'd hated that turtle, god, he'd hated that turtle for ending the moment even if Helga herself would have crushed it all just a second or two later all on her own, devastated him with a look, a word, her face closing off and her eyes hardening and in hindsight, _god_—_

_In hindsight, god, Helga had taught him so well._

* * *

Helga's life fills the little drawer unit, and it's too much life to be held in just these small things.

Letters and hard-covered journals, small boxes that shake with trinkets that she could not throw away and notebooks so old they were threatening to fall right off the old spiral bindings.

The letters had been carefully laid out and pressed flat to make as much room as possible, their matching envelopes tucked next to them, each addressed to Helga from Inga. The pages are filled with easy things and heavy things, advice on how to keep the fabric from tightening and assurances that things will not always be this painful, promises that Helga had been forced to keep if she ever wanted Inga's permission to visit her when she came of age. Plane tickets are a promise that Inga had kept hers and Arnold is achingly grateful, notes that the last letter had arrived only a month or so before.

The letters are on top, a shield between her most private life and the world outside the drawers and Arnold is stupid, yeah, but he's not that kind of stupid, not unless he's trying to be.

"We'll have to contact her," he manages as he touches a palm to the letters, but Phoebe simply shakes her head and reaches past him to thumb an old journal, impossibly ancient but still kept safe.

"She threw out a bunch of them over the years," she says quietly, and he cannot touch the journals, is too afraid to, knows too well what all is contained within them and cannot survive Helga's heart.

Even gone she is too much for him, burns too brightly for him to touch without her reducing him to ash.

"—are the ones she couldn't let go of."

Arnold moves past them, unable to cope, and instead peeks into one of the small containers. An old keychain, the pocketknife he recognizes immediately as the one she'd bought as a kid, a couple of plastic rings and an old shoelace and he understands only the pocketknife, and sets the box aside.

More journals and a pile of fabric that Phoebe laughs at quietly, stretches out for him to see.

"Her first scarf," she explains as she pulls it close, cradles it to her heart. "She was making it for my birthday but then she refused to give it to me," and if he weren't aching so, he'd be laughing.

There's holes in the scarf, and really awful tassels and knots on the sides and—

And he would have worn it, wouldn't have let her steal it back even if she were embarrassed.

There's a pile of pictures in one corner, and he flips through them carefully, recognizing immediately their age but taking a minute longer to recognize Miriam in the young blonde woman with the giant hair and the bright smile on her face. Miriam as a little girl, Miriam at her sixteenth birthday party, Miriam in her graduation gown and looking almost the same age in the next snapshot as she stands proud and visibly pregnant and impossibly horribly young with someone that he recognizes instantly as Bob.

It's his only appearance in Helga's carefully hidden life so far, and he doubts Bob will appear again.

A high school yearbook that must be Miriam's as well, and then her obituary tucked between the pages ("survived by a loving husband and devoted daughters") and he closes the book immediately a moment later, rattled when he glimpses the corner of the picture hidden in the back pages. "Right," he breathes and Phoebe doesn't seem bothered, sad but not bothered.

"She had to sneak to get the picture behind Bob's back," she explains, and he somehow has no doubt who it was that helped Helga orchestrate that particular little mission.

"I didn't get a picture of my grandparents in their caskets," he feels the need to say aloud and she just stares at him flatly, expression bland and fearless, one eyebrow lifted just slightly.

"It was important to Helga," is all she finally says, and his hands remember the feel of the box that Helga is now locked inside, and he will not forget the feel of it if he lives another hundred years.

* * *

_His parents live with him now, had moved in and refused to leave him since they had come back the final time from their obsessive trips away from the States, and he hates them more._

_His father finds him with his brushes and his paints the night before he goes to see Dr. King, hovers in the doorway for too long while Arnold works slow and careful, his blindingly bright lamps highlighting the streaks of color._

_After too many minutes of awkward silence: "Do you need anything?"_

_"Nothing from you," and it's the first honest response Arnold has let himself express in years._

_Because he had waited and then he had searched and he had found them and for a little while they had been happy with him— until they'd felt that urge to go exploring again, and he'd been stupid enough to rip up his entire life to follow them, to stay with them for _years_ and he had lost everything—_

_His eyes hurt, his neck aches, but he's got the image burned into his mind and he can't sleep anyway, has tossed and turned until he's worked himself up even more the couple of times he's tried._

_"Your mom's worried about you."_

_Arnold is only shifting upwards from his work, unable to hide his irritation as he tilts his head up to face his father, to meet the older man's gaze heatedly. "You're stealing my light," he forces himself to explain as calmly as possible, and feels nothing but an awful relief at the pain in his father's face._

_Because Arnold wants him to suffer and he can admit it now, there's no reason not to, there's nothing in his life that he's avoiding anymore, he has lost everything, has torn it all to shreds because all of his bated breaths had been for nothing in the end, they were as _human_ as everyone else—_

_His father says, voice heavy with sadness, eyes dark with emotion: "I'm so sorry, son."_

_And he is, Arnold sees it in the deep lines of his face, hears it in his voice._

_But it doesn't matter, not anymore, and things feel… uneven and dangerous right now, and he cannot think of how to avoid the feeling, of how to escape the pain he's feeling, he can only drown in it._

_"It doesn't matter," he assures his father as he turns back to his work, and he can taste salt but it doesn't matter either, all that matters is the mixing of the colors, the lines and curves in front of him._

_After a long time, he hears footsteps fade away and he does not think again about his father._

* * *

"Did I make her happy?" he asks, as Helga's life lies scattered around them like the wreckage of a ship tossed apart upon the rocks. Down in the bottom of the drawers, deep down beneath everything else he has found the four pictures she had kept of him and he does not recognize the boy she'd loved.

Phoebe's laugh is short and sad, a little bitter, as she cradles the mess of a scarf to her chest.

"You're the only one who did."

* * *

_an: one reviewer suggested that everything will be explained in time. this is correct. next update is done but will not be posted for a few days while i work on the next few chapters after that. pretty quickly i know a few of you will at least figure out the basic concept. go ahead, come up with some ideas. the next update will, uh, explain at least a couple of things.  
_


	3. two

**2—**

_It's startlingly easy to sit so close to her sister's new grave._

_She's been there for a good hour or so, her untouched drink wrapped in her hands and her eyes focused in the distance when he shows up earlier than she had told him to show up._

_He looks tired and guilty, and hovers nervously for a minute before he simply drops down onto the cheery little bench tucked under one of the less ominous trees in the cemetery._

_"Nice guilt trip," he congratulates, and she can feel the edges in the grin she offers him._

_"I figured we'd try something new."_

_He takes a breath, lets it out, the old irritation only she'd been able to bring out of him flaring easily in spite of the decade that had passed since they'd left school behind. But the frustration is tired now, fragile with remorse that even she has to admit he shouldn't be feeling._

_She watches him for a minute carefully, takes in the age that's begun to show on his face, in the way his shoulders are beginning to hunch inward when he is sure no one is watching, and almost hates herself for forcing so much of his focus on her own problems._

_But—_

_But._

_"How can you let—?"_

_"I'm not _letting_ anybody _do_ anything."_

_There is an edge in his voice, a warning, and she can't even begin to give a shit._

_Instead she glares vaguely at the new grave and seethes, her moment of sympathy all blown to hell as she tries to calm down the fury rolling inside her, tries to control the pain beneath it. There is a sigh beside her, restless and uneasy, and she grits her teeth as he gets to his feet, takes two steps and then hesitates. She can feel his gaze on her, the sadness in it, but she controls herself until he takes another step and then she breaks a little, weak with her grief, "You have to help me—"_

_"Helga, your sister is already _dead_—"_

_Something in her snaps apart, and she is on her feet and in his face before she can stop herself, and he falls back a step before the iced drink hits the grass and she shoves at him viciously, childishly, unable to hide the anguish that she knows is warping her face. "Of _course_ she's dead," and if her voice comes out harsh and a little high-pitched, she cannot help it. "She's been dead for _years_," she barks and lunges at him again, in some ways more wild than she has ever been, "and I was the only one who—"_

_It's been a while since she's actually gone for anybody's face in a blind rage (to say the least) and she blames that for how godawful she now is at the whole beat-the-crap-out-of-someone thing._

_Because suddenly she's down in the grass, her breath knocked out of her body and wearing what she knows is a dumb-as-bricks expression on her face. She blinks, shudders a little as she tries to get the breath back into her lungs, and catches sight of the new marble that sits so close to where she's been laid out by herself._

_"Helga…"_

_She closes her eyes against his voice, sad and tired and _old_, and kind of hates him for how he bends down to touch her back in a silent offer to help her despite the fact that she'd just totally tried to break his face._

_"It's a probably a good thing that didn't happen," she admits after a long moment of silence, and the quiet huff of a laugh she hears eases some of the tension in her, allows her to allow him to help her up. "Phoebe would have killed me." Her elbow hurts, her knees too, and very suddenly she cannot look at the marker so close to her side, can only stare at the now-empty drink cup in the grass._

_"I'm sorry."_

_And he is, and he has been since the beginning, and it's why her sister had even survived that long. It's why he's even standing out here feeling like absolute shit and not even hiding it, and it's why it hurts so much when she feels him touch her shoulder too carefully, let go slowly._

_"I can't just—"_

Let it go.

_Because she has a list of things she has let go of, a long list of things that she understands now she'd had to let go of or else they would have dragged her down with them, and she gets it now. She's had her revelations and her epiphanies, her psychologists and her counselors, and she's alive because she'd had them, because she'd let herself survive on something other than anger and pain and, hey, it had been okay._

_But not this, she cannot let go of this, she cannot—_

_She's crying again, draws away from Gerald's touch before she even thinks to do it and turns her face away as if that will hide her from his gaze and he knows her enough, gives enough of a shit about her, to not say anything as she shudders through the waves of emotion, the old grief and the new._

_Her mother is buried a good hundred yards away (and Big Bob's spot beside her is still reserved as if their marriage had been what he cannot admit he had never allowed it to be) and now her sister is under the ground too, and it's only Helga's viciousness that had made Bob back down on where to bury Olga, that had allowed her to find a bright little corner where her sister can be alone._

_(And she can't help but think it's telling that now it's only her and Bob that are still going strong.)_

_"I told you I'm not letting it go," he's telling her quietly, certainty strong in his voice despite his exhaustion, and she can't look at him, cannot force herself to. "But you have to promise me you'll stay out of this, you can't… you can't get involved in this, Helga, it's too dangerous."_

Because I _promised_ him, because I love Phoebe, because I don't actually hate you_… all reasons that she can hear in his voice, all truths that she can't really hate him for (not even the first one, not even that one, and it's impressive how they all manage to never mention even his name around her)._

_He says, "Helga," and she jerks in a breath, snaps her head around to stare at him in irritation._

_"I'm not letting go of this."_

_"Just promise me—" She makes a noise, something startlingly close to the sound Betsy makes when Helga calls her a bad girl and she knows it's true, but doesn't throw off his hand when he grabs her arm, keeps her where she is for just a moment longer. "Promise me you won't do anything stupid."_

_"I'm not going to—"_

_"Pataki, I'm _serious_!" and there is something like fear there now, something that makes her feel guilty and it's totally something he must have picked up from Phoebe because they aren't this close. They totally aren't even if they get together sometimes just to do stupid shit like sneak dollar store snacks into movie theaters like they aren't grown-ass adults and just to show they can still do it—_

_She sucks in a breath and rips her arm out of his grip, steps away when he tries to follow. "Fine!" she barks when he still follows and it's the closest she's come to being this… unsteady since she'd been a teenage girl, alone and angry and in so much pain that she looks back on it even today and still doesn't know how she'd survived without destroying everything around her to keep herself going._

_She leaves her friend and her sister behind in the cemetery to make friends, and if she's crying again, desperation making the grief feel so much worse than it already does, she tries not to think on it._

_Helga goes home to Betsy, and spends the rest of her last day off curled around the dog in her bed._

* * *

Three days after the memorial, and Betsy will not leave his side.

His time is at first split between Helga's empty house and his childhood home, between the future he will not have and the past he cannot let go of. Phoebe does not demand that he leave and he does not want the house to be empty, cannot bear the thought of Helga's home being taken from even the memory of her.

She had worked so hard to create one for herself.

Phoebe shows up every day _without _the almost-toddler on one hip ("my mother needs someone to baby right now anyway" and her voice is thin but stays strong as she avoids his gaze) and with whatever take-out she decides is interesting today, seemingly unsure how she feels about him but having decided that he is possibly the only one hurting as much as she is right now. Gerald simply says, "stay there" with a level of intensity that is almost frightening, assures him that this is best for right now and agrees that the house shouldn't be sold yet, that no decisions should be made.

The other man is visibly exhausted the few times Arnold actually sees him, so worn down that worry pierces even Arnold's grief-filled haze, but Gerald brushes off his concern, promises that he's also grieving and that he's simply working too many hours on top of that.

It's a lie, and Arnold knows it, and he cannot care.

Because Helga's scent still fills her house, and the dog loves him, sleeps between his legs as Arnold spends long nights dozing on Helga's folded out couch, and it's the only place he _can _sleep because everything that is left of Helga sits safe and secure around him.

(He will not go back to the boarding house at _all _for the rest of week.)

* * *

_"So you're just going to… live there for right now?" Dr. King seems torn between disappointment and grief, and he studies his hands as an excuse to not meet her eyes. "Arnold?"_

_"I want this."_

_There's no other way to express it, to put it into words, and it's odd to feel so sure of himself._

_"What do you think your parents think of this?"_

_Anger sparks inside him, close to the surface now that he's slipped under. "I don't care."_

_Like he isn't almost thirty years old, like he doesn't love them desperately, like— like he's still the stunned and angry fifteen year old boy that's just lost one parent (and _that_ parent could remember when he had lost his first tooth and _that_ parent had taught him how to check the oil of a car) and knows he only has so long with the other one (the parent that had taught him to use a hula hoop one night right there in the living room)._

_Except he is, and he can't hide it anymore, and it doesn't seem… important anymore to hide it, to pretend he doesn't feel what he's been feeling for so long that his life before it feels distant._

_It's done him no good for the last fifteen years._

_"What would your grandparents think of this?"_

_And the laughter bubbles out of him in a moment of weakness, the old grief stronger than it had ever been over a decade later: "They'd set up camp with me, actual camp too, with a tent and everything, right there in her living room, wouldn't think twice," he informs her without hesitation, and he swallows and breathes as he is left to rein himself in yet again because he cannot grieve now, not even _now_._

* * *

After five days, he allows himself to process the few things he has allowed himself to know.

He knows from Gerald that it was a miracle Helga had survived the wreck in the first place, and that the first officer on the scene had found her half-stuck in the metal and rushed to her aid. He knows (would know even if he hadn't heard) that she'd pushed the officer off as soon as she'd been free and struggled to her feet for just a moment, bleeding and rambling and frighteningly alert until she'd collapsed. He knows that she hadn't lost her pulse, had been breathing by herself from the first moment until she had stopped on the way to the emergency surgery, but that she hadn't regained consciousness again.

This is all Arnold knows and for five days, he does not think very much beyond this.

(and he will not think very much beyond this for another two days.)

But every night (like every night since he had received the call in the middle of the night) he dreams until he wakes himself with a damp face and a tight chest.

Once Helga is leaving the boarding house like she had years before except that suddenly he is in the hospital waiting room and cannot get out, cannot get to her room, and he is trying harder than he has tried to do anything in what feels like a lifetime and _she is too far away _and he cannot get out, cannot reach her; another time he can only stand and watch her struggle to drag herself out of the wreckage (and he only knows that she'd had a minivan, doesn't even know what color it had been or what exactly is left of it) unable to hear him as he calls to her, and there is no officer that comes to her aid, no help, and so she dies alone, the fire in her fading.

A couple of times he is chasing Helga down old sidewalks that twist away from the boarding house and vanish into the dark where he cannot see. He struggles to follow but trips over his own feet, and she glances back at him with betrayed eyes before she seems to give up and simply takes off alone.

And in one, in the one that keeps repeating, Helga is perched above him as he struggles to keep from sliding under the waves and when she reaches to pull him to safety, he is only barely able to catch her hand. Except that then he's the one perched safely above her and he's not reaching to pull her out, he's pushing her down, deeper into nothing, and that dream is more horrible than all the others and that dream that ruins his sleep for the rest of the night.

Every morning, though, Betsy drags him outside and up and down the little street, and it's a bizarre thing, being awake and functioning so early in the day after so many years refusing to wake until noon.

She is an amazing dog, and Arnold is quietly sure at least part of that brilliance came from Helga.

He cuddles her as they lounge together on the couch and Phoebe and Gerald's family movies flicker across the screen, and neither looks away from the images, both held captivated. Because Helga appears periodically, a ghost treasured by those who love her, and Arnold is greedy, vulnerable.

But there is no one here but Betsy, and she understands, sighs quietly against his body as she watches Helga move around in the background as Phoebe displays the new baby to the camera. Helga looks tired but happy in her jeans and her old striped shirt, glances at Phoebe every so often with smug pride in her face as she arranges and rearranges the new mother's things, and the baby, Gerald's little boy, seems different to him now when he thinks about the impossibly young boy that he's seen more than a few times.

Because _this _baby is Helga's little godson, and he realizes now that all of the toddler's baby blankets and little hats and little sweaters must have come from her, she must have made them with her own hands, wrapped him in her own handmade gifts since the moment he'd been born.

He begins to wish Phoebe would bring the baby by when she visits, and watches Helga as she stares at the new mother and baby with her heart in her eyes and a sadly happy smile on her face.

* * *

_Bob does not even contact them, and the memorial is planned completely by Phoebe (as if she would have allowed him to have an input at all, as if he would be welcome by any of them)._

_Arnold cannot bear to even hear about it, and Phoebe plans through her tears as Gerald works long hours through the night, and so it is an impossibly private affair, a small gathering._

_Helga had kept a friendship going with Rhonda, and Eugene sends his condolences from the other side of town by doing the flower arrangements without charge from his own shop, and more than one person admits in the midst of the gathering that they are nice. Lila cries openly from where she sits so close to Rhonda, the preschool teacher pale and seemingly still in shock, and only exchanges a few words with Phoebe. (Rhonda herself sits stiff and uncomfortable in a little black dress and heels, most of her face covered completely by a massive pair of impossibly dark sunglasses, and barely speaks a word to anyone other than Lila.)_

_The rest of the people are strangers, a small handful of people their age or older, most of them coming from her work and a few coming with stories of Helga throughout her college life._

_"Work's going to suck now," her boss simply says (a forty something man with a tired face and old eyes) and that seems to be the baseline for many, that the spark has left their life._

_Arnold sits as close to the casket as possible, does not look away from it from the beginning of the service to the end, and could not even if he still wanted to._

_The voices fade away, movement following as the hugs and tearful embraces begin anew, and he reaches forward as soon as his mind recognizes he is allowed. He takes one step, two, and then he is sliding a palm across the shiny wood— ignoring the quieting behind him, the awkward hesitation._

_Something escapes him, some quiet noise that could not be spoken even if he were brave, and his fingers trace the sweeping curve of the wood, knowing that her body had not recovered before it given up on her. She is still littered with bruises, and his survival instinct insists that he should open it, burn the image into his mind to erase what is left of her, abandon her and continue as he has everyone else and he cannot, the very thought of it is... impossible to comprehend, there being nothing left of Helga even in his memories._

_"Arnold," is muttered, hands touching his shoulders, and he closes his eyes and leans uselessly (protectively) over the casket, head shaking as he struggles with the words. "Don't do this, please—"_

_"I'll stay," he promises her without shame, without fear, "you can have what's left, I'll stay—"_

_But Gerald is pulling him back, taking his hands off of the casket (breaking the only contact he will ever have _ever_ again) and the crowd stays far away as he is shuffled through them._

_(Helga's boss, watching the entire moment, simply looks confused and uncomfortable.)_

* * *

On the screen Helga has aged beautifully.

Tucked into the corner booth with her lap full of yarn and needles, a durable-looking little phone sitting by a glass of what looks like wine, Helga greets the holder of the camera with a roll of a shoulder and a smile that cuts as she chirps, "Pheebs!" and yes, yes, she's a little drunk.

Her earrings are bright even in the shadows, and she'd grown her hair out, and there's a kind of… lightness to her face that leaves his chest tightening and his eyes burning.

"You," she informs the camera coolly, "are getting married tomorrow—"

"Hi," a voice keens beside her and Arnold smiles helplessly at Helga's expression as Lila almost topples into her lap, only Helga herself keeping the redhead from a bash against the table and possible death.

"Go back to your wine cooler," Helga sighs at her, pushing her easily back wherever she'd come from, and he can hear feminine laughter ringing out around the table, a giggle behind the camera.

Something buzzes in the background and Helga shoots a dismissive glance at her cell phone before returning to her slightly wandering but completely _adorable _speech to Phoebe on the night before her wedding and at some point Lila is beginning to slip back into frame, half-asleep with her cheek pillowed on Helga's shoulder and looking quite content where she is.

If Helga cares at all that Lila is using her a bed, there's no sign of it in her face, her voice.

There is a gentleness to this Helga that he had seen develop in those last few years of their childhood, something strong and protective in her shoulders, her face, her voice— but it is startlingly painful to see so clearly here, to _feel_ it and know that it is already gone, that he has lost it. Forced to be independent for most of her life, she had become fearless only years later, and he had watched some of that woman rises from the ashes of the girl and he had fled from it every time he could have joined her.

Because it had terrified him beyond words, the awful knowledge that he would have to follow her to keep up with her.

Because as he had self-destructed, she had been born anew, and she had waited for him, and he remembers too clearly the day she had left him the final time, had allowed him to destroy himself because she _knew_.

Because she had understood, and he is only barely paying attention to her words, is watching her face and listening to her voice, surrounding himself in what he has left of her now that she is gone.

Buzzing again, and Helga stops talking for a moment to check it and then make an expression at it, anger and disgust darkening her features. "—criminy, Bob, take care of your own mess—" and the phone is shoved aside, ignored pointedly, and if something tugs at Arnold's attention, he can't focus on it past the way she moves as she reaches to push loose hair from her face, past the cocky little grin that lights up her face as she turns her attention back to the camera.

"And don't forget, don't forget—" More giggling, more laughter, "You promised to name the first one after Roddy Piper, screw Sgt. Ron—"

"Helga, that doesn't even make any sense—"

(_it must be Rhonda_, a small voice in the back of his head insists, and she sounds relaxed and loose and playful and it's all strange and bizarre.)

More giggling, Helga's face light and fearless, _happy_, and he wants to kiss her, tuck his face into her neck and breathe her in: "I have to have awesome kids vicariously through you, get with the program—"

* * *

The kiddo wakes him just a half-hour after he finally gets home.

Eyes snapping open at the babble that reaches him through the baby monitor, Gerald lays sprawled under the sheets for another few seconds, so tired his heart beats a little unsteadily in his chest.

Another few seconds and Phoebe shifts tiredly beside him, tries to rouse herself.

There had still been tear tracks on her cheeks when he'd gotten home to find her sleeping fitfully under the covers, and he rolls over immediately to pat her shoulder. "I got it," he assures her, and she makes a tired little noise, small and sad, and is asleep again in a matter of moments.

A little more awake, he pushes to his feet and staggers out of the bedroom (managing not to swear when his shoulder hits the door hard enough to hurt) and down the hall.

James is waiting for him in the next room, the expression on his small face irritated as he holds himself up to the bars of his crib. Upon seeing his father, he bounces a few times as his babbling hits a higher, more demanding pitch and his arms reach up for attention.

Halfway to the crib, Gerald stops, glances down.

The red and blue crochet blanket has been tossed to the floor, the little knit bulldog lying beside it.

His son shrieks suddenly, the time angry to the point of tears, and Gerald grabs him immediately before hastily snapping the baby monitor in this room off and easing down into the rocking chair.

"So bossy," he breathes tiredly, and feels a pang of guilt as the toddler makes an unhappy noise, damp eyes locked on the gifts he'd flung out of his crib in a fit of anger. "Come on, little man…"

The toddler glances up at him, startlingly smart despite being unable to completely handle even the concept of a spoon ("nah, he just hates 'em," he will always remember Helga assuring him as James had flung his third one away from his high chair with an expression of great dislike) and snuffles.

Emotion twists in his gut, guilt and grief a jagged ache inside, and he starts rocking as he looks away from his son, stares without seeing at the nursery around him, the furniture sitting strong—

_Helga announces, hyper on three cups of coffee and something like fear: "_She _did it."_

_Gerald glances at his pregnant wife sitting with her best friend in the midst of the half-finished baby furniture, blinks at Helga again and tries to consider which one is less of a danger to his mortality and his sanity._

_"Uh," he finally says, and Helga looks close to stabbing what looks like a pipe through what looks like a tiny mattress, hair hanging tangled around her face and wearing the ancient undershirt and shorts she keeps at the house for when she spends the night._

_"We may have tried to do too many pieces of furniture at once," Phoebe says slowly, too calmly, and he stands frozen in the doorway of the nursery, wondering if he can make it to the car in time—_

"Gerald."

He snaps out of the daze without much effort at all, head lifting from his chest to find Phoebe leaning against the doorway, his cell gripped in one hand and looking far more alert than he would have expected this late at night. "What?"

Her expression is tight and unsure as her fingers tighten around the phone, flex uncomfortably.

"It's Arnold," she finally says, and holds out the phone to him like she doesn't want to touch it.

The action is entirely bizarre and he rouses himself the rest of the way as he stands, steps carefully to ease the now-sleeping James down into the crib and tuck him in. Takes the moment while doing that to take a deep breath and let it out, take another and let it out.

She kisses him when he takes the phone from her, that easy brush of her lips on his jaw that he remembers from that first little kiss so many years before and that he always gets such simple joy out of him, and steps aside.

He stares down at the phone for a second, tired and guilt-ridden, and finally gets the balls.

"Hey," he greets too easily as he swings the phone up to his ear, starts walking to the living room.

"Gerald."

And he might falter mid-step for just a moment, terribly confused and struck dumb by the change in Arnold's voice, by the alertness and the focus evident just in that one word. His chest feels tight, and he can't begin to process _why_ with everything else he's juggling, and he barely manages, "Hey, man."

"What happened?"

Wait, wait— "What?"

"How did she even crash?" and then, before Gerald can even get his breath back from the shock of the question: "She's always been a good driver, how did she even crash, how did she—" His voice breaks, tears clear in his words, but Arnold is rushing on ahead a moment later, "how did it even happen?"

Gerald is standing in the middle of his darkened living room in shock and can hear Arnold breathing on the other side of the connection, grieving for a lover he'd never accepted but suddenly sounding… awake.

The green-lit numbers on the DVD player a few feet away blink to 3:29.

* * *

_an: so... carry on with the guessing, dears. it delights and inspires me.  
_


	4. three

_i lied a lot too, maybe to forget you  
my heart still beats for you_

_- anna ternheim_

* * *

**three—**

_Helga at fifteen is a distant firestorm he cannot hope to survive._

_Later he will understand that this had been just one of the steps of her growth, that she had also been working to survive pain he couldn't know about at the time, but now he is overwhelmed._

_She's a well-known force in the neighborhood when he returns to town to bury his grandfather, and she's different and she's the same all at once, and it's all too confusing to deal with on top of the pain inside, that she could be more herself and so different at the same time. "She hasn't beat anybody up in a few years except for those jocks that went after Gerald," Sid shrugs once, and Arnold is watching her across the room as she talks to Phoebe over their lunch (Phoebe eating a healthy assortment of vegetables, and Helga devouring several items from the vending machine in the corner of the cafeteria). ("And she went after _them_ with a baseball bat so her homicidal tendencies are still there," Arnold will always remember Eugene tacking on to Sid's response.)_

_He sees her a half-dozen times outside of school just in the first week he's back: baseball bat swinging easily in her fists as she plays a game in the old vacant lot (he will forever think of it as Gerald Field even if Gerald himself doesn't seem to care very much anymore) and walking home alone by herself in the middle of the night from wherever it is she goes three times a week. He spots her at the grocery store once, dropping the food she picks up into an insulated bag she's got tossed over a shoulder and setting off alone, and he catches sight of her twice on the bus with a pile of books from the library._

_("Isn't that one of your friends?" he remembers his father asking at the grocery store as Helga had strode right past him, and he'd felt nervous and unhappy with how awkward his parents always looked in something as simple and normal as a grocery store.)_

_When Arnold finally works up enough courage to say, "Hey" to her two weeks after he's back in town—_

_Helga just says, "hey" and continues to tear apart her dollar store beef jerky between classes._

* * *

His parents are starting to call more often, are losing their ability to give him his space.

Arnold is only irritated by what feels like an outside intrusion as he rejects yet another phone call and wrestles the ball out of Betsy's mouth, cocks his arm to throw it out again. She takes off with a joy that he envies but cannot hate her for, and he watches her tear happily across the grass, exhilarated.

"You're pretty good with her."

Gerald's voice is odd, and his face is tight when Arnold glances over expectantly.

"She's great," he manages past the flutter of pain in his chest and praises her without words when she brings her toy back again, rubbing the spots on her neck that she loves until she's bouncing a little. She's so caught up in her enjoyment that her double-take is hysterical when she finally notices that the ball's gone again, that it's sailing easily through the air impossibly fast _away from her_.

Betsy trips over herself but doesn't seem to care as she launches out across the grass again.

"Jesus, man, you torture her as bad as Helga did…"

The hushed tone is muffled with something that's not quite pain and not quite irritation, and Arnold isn't completely sure what to make of it, is beginning to think that this Gerald isn't his old Gerald.

And he doesn't know when it happened, can't remember, and he thinks of the few of Helga's birthdays that he now has a little bit of film of, of Christmases and Thanksgivings and several "family" vacations that had happened in a world far away from the one he has only been surviving in so long.

"What happened?" It is just one of the questions that are burning inside of him, one that has begun to eat at him in the last day and a half, and one that he can no longer deny. He needs to fill in every hole, understand how he had lost her. Because it's not the terrible tangle between them that he needs to understand (because he already knows it and it's too big to work through now, he cannot even begin yet) it's this, the _awfulness_ of it. "How did she—"

And he shuts up when Gerald seems to shudder all over, hunches his shoulders oddly and stares out at the park in the early morning light with frightened eyes.

"She died, man, I don't know what else—" The words break down into an awful heavy silence and Gerald rubs at his face, swings his head around to gaze at Arnold warily. "She started bleeding and they ran her off to surgery, and that's, that's all there is to it."

"But before that," and Arnold has forgotten what it feels to push like this, to be so desperate for answers that feel like they matter, that feel like they can reset something terrible if he can find them. "Before that, I need to know before that, I need to know what happened."

"I _told_ you what happened."

A part of him thinks, quiet in the back of his mind and startlingly aware: _his voice is wrong_ and Arnold does not care, he cannot, he can only push harder, fight through his self-preservation.

"The crash," he pushes without conscious thought, and scratches Betsy on her neck when she pushes into his hands for attention, and continues without a beat, "I don't even know how she went off the road in the first place, Gerald, I need to know—"

_How it was I lost all of my chances (every last one I ever could have fought for) and how I lost every holiday I will never have and every family dinner I will never allow myself to enjoy, and how it is it's all gone and her house is empty and I will never see her _happy_ again—_

"She went off the road and flipped." The words are flat, recited without thought as Gerald stares at the grass under his boots, refuses to look him completely in the eye. "She must have been… driving too fast or something because she went off the road and flipped and only stopped because she hit a tree."

Arnold does not speak, can only focus on one breath after another, is oddly sure that if he does not make himself breathe his body will simply shut down, will give up and stop and never start up again.

The something in his back of his mind murmurs, unhappy and restless: _that's not like her anymore_ but he is in too much pain to process the insistent little voice, has been struck mute by the flood of feeling. He stares down at the grass himself as he forces himself to keep breathing, sickly imagining what the crash must have felt like for her, the shock her body must have experienced in that last impact.

Before he can stop himself: "How much pain was she in?"

Something crosses Gerald's face, something quietly bitter and viciously angry, but it's gone, hastily hidden, before Arnold can do much more than tense in surprise, unsure how to even approach it. "She—" then Gerald stops, frown creasing his mouth, as he seems to consider. "You saw her."

A splintered image in the back of his mind, Helga under the sheets in the hospital bed, body bruised but heart beating strong under his palm, and he'd _felt_ her, known she was there—

And there's a brighter memory, one burned indefinitely into his mind a few years before, Helga cool-eyed and impossibly still in that ridiculous blue bridesmaid gown and he'd stood like an idiot at his best friend's side for the entire ceremony just staring at her, openly, in front of their friends and family. His parents had been there, he remembers clearly, cared for Gerald and for Phoebe both, and he'd refused to say a word to her, refused because he knows she _would_ have responded, and grown angry when his mother had asked, impossibly frustrated and impossibly sad: "Don't you want to talk to her at _all_?"

And he remembers the truth (the one he cannot admit to even himself many nights) that he'd felt the weight of her gaze once, twice, maybe a dozen times (and it is impossible now to miss the pain and pleasure that coils inside him when he feels the weight of her focus on him) and that their eyes had never met not just because of her but because he had never let her even begin to bridge the distance. Because she'd still been hurt, had not hidden her anger at his refusal to _live_, but he—

He understands now that he has always been terrified of the defiant drumbeat of her heart.

_You saw her._

"Yeah," he mutters as Betsy pushes against his legs for his attention, "yeah, I saw her."

* * *

_In the end the confession, months after he returns and so long after all of the years of theatrics, is brutally simple. (In hindsight, he will understand how important it is that it follows what he has been horribly sure is his continuing failure to engage her in an actual two-people-talking-like-people conversation but now he is damaged and too young and too tired to comprehend.)_

_He's trying to figure out which book he actually needs for the next class, struggling to pay attention to the time and still not used to _needing_ to pay attention to the time after the last few years in San Lorenzo, when she walks over and stands by him, not quite in his personal space but… hovering._

_He says "hey, Helga" (the only response she seems to be able to accept from him usually, always looking at him like he's an idiot when he tries anything else) and doesn't look at her (she seems to always be staring back at him like he's an idiot when he does) and tries to ignore that weird flipping feeling in his chest that he keeps having every time he sees her._

_A minute passes and he finally realizes she's just standing there, hands shoved into the pockets of her jeans and shoulders tucked up a little, expression wary but tired as she stares at the wall of lockers._

_He says, "uh" uselessly, and the flipping gets a little worse._

_They're the same height now, and today there's a bruise at the corner of her mouth, and his nose wants to twitch because she smells like dirt and thrift store and some kind of flowery shampoo that she probably buys for herself at the dollar store ("she can take care of herself no problem," Gerald had answered the one time the question of how Helga was doing had come up)._

_"You know." He almost wants to say there's something defeated in her voice but that's not it, not really— it's something quieter, calmer, something sad and tired and steady in its simplicity. His mouth opens, closes, opens again, and his back hurts suddenly, and he kind of feels like the walls are closing in and then she plunges ahead fearlessly, "I _know_ you know so… I just… wanted you to know."_

_He says, "I don't—" and she _looks_ at him, and he can't manage anything else._

_She is young and old in front of him, and he thinks dumbly, stupidly, that she is beautiful._

_And not in any way that people would understand if Arnold would even try to explain it, but it's in the clearness of her gaze (no longer over bright with that frantic energy that had always confused him a little) and the way her shoulders have come up bravely, the way she stares at him and waits and doesn't seem afraid of anything that he could possibly say in response._

_And it is a lie that he does not watch her now (and an even bigger one to say that he had never stared at her for long minutes just _thinking_ when they had been younger) and that the other part of him, that part that feels dead and too weak to survive, likes the way she runs up and down the street in her tank tops and old denim shorts in the muggy heat, eyes skimming over the muscles of her arms and her legs._

_The dirt that smudges the pale skin of her throat right now, and the bruise at her mouth—_

_And Arnold panics, is fifteen years old and unable (unwilling) to grieve and tongue-tied and unsure in this world where Helga feels like the only safety from the storm, and he feels young and old._

_Arnold says without thinking, "I don't want—" before he can stop himself, and only feels more flustered when the only response is a flicker of some strong emotion in her gaze, her figure shifting awkwardly for a moment before she lets out a quiet breath and starts to nod._

_Helga is patient, and sad but sure, and there is something soft and understanding on her face._

_It is the last that breaks him, that causes him to bolt, terrified and suddenly in agony._

_His body reacts before he can stop himself and the world tilts as he turns away and sets off down the hall away from her, and he realizes that he is almost about to run, and he cannot stop himself._

_Arnold has a last glimpse of Helga as he practically careens around the corner, striding off alone without another look back, long legs carrying her easily away from him._

* * *

"How did she lose Olga?"

There is only an uncomfortable silence, this man who had once been his best friend looking like he'd rather be anywhere but here and not even trying to hide it from him. "You have all of Helga's stuff," he answers when he seems to be able to speak, but Arnold shakes his head.

"I'm not going through her journals, Gerald."

Hesitation, some terrible grief passing behind Gerald's eyes before— "She started having problems when Helga was, I don't know, fourteen, fifteen, I wanna say fourteen, it was a little while—" _Before you got back_, is not spoken but Arnold nods slowly, carefully, and waits silently. "She got real bad when we were like seventeen, and then there was the suicide attempt—" Gerald looks over when he feels the jolt of Arnold's shock beside him, seemingly confused for a moment. "You didn't—"

Arnold cannot keep his face expressionless, and knows that is answer enough.

"Nobody told me." He cannot keep the accusation out of his voice, and then is left stunned by the emotion coiling through him, the way white-hot anger sparks through him. "You didn't tell me."

The odd something passes behind Gerald's eyes again, the words sharp in the afternoon heat as he snaps without seeming to think twice: "You were there."

"Helga didn't tell me."

Gerald snorts, the noise so ridiculous that it almost kills Arnold's simmering anger (almost). "Uh, she didn't tell me either, okay? I found out from Phoebe and she only found out because she's the best friend. You remember how that whole best friend thing works, right?"

(he cannot only be imagining the bite to the last words, the tension in Gerald's shoulders)

"What happened to her?"

And what happened to _Helga_ because of it and now he needs to know, feels the corner of some invisible puzzle piece under his fingers and feels that it is much more central than he'd thought and he cannot get a grip on it and the pain is debilitating.

"She got better, she got worse. Ran away from Helga a few times, came back home…" The other man takes a breath and then lets it out, refuses to look over at him. "She came back the last time a couple years ago and moved in with Helga and it was working well, she started seeing an actual doctor, stopped the rest of the stupid shit she'd been doing and got her own apartment—"

"Like what?"

"It really doesn't matter anymore."

_He's lying_, that increasingly awake little voice in his mind mutters unhappily, and Arnold knows that the voice is right as surely as he knows that Gerald will not answer this question.

"What happened to her?"

"You know what happened to her."

Arnold is aware of Betsy settled against his legs, tired from her activity and just happy to be with someone, and if there has ever been doubt in him that she missed Helga, there is none when he glances down, finds her head leaning on his knees and her eyes focused on Gerald.

Still happy from her play, she suddenly seems… terribly despondent as well.

He remembers Helga's sister in the old pictures, the growing sadness in her face, the weariness.

"Olga killed herself," he says slowly, softly, weighing the words carefully.

But Gerald says nothing beside him, and is staring out at the park when Arnold studies him mutely.

He manages, finally, "Gerald?"

"It was ruled a suicide," is all the man finally responds, the words a little too calm, and now Arnold realizes that Gerald's pushing his legs restlessly into the grass, is picking at his jeans impatiently. "I wasn't the first officer on the scene, man, and it wasn't the worst mess I ever saw but—"

And he stops, so suddenly and so completely that it's a little disturbing.

Before Arnold can think, before he can blink, Gerald is on his feet and shifting uncomfortably, and it's all wrong, his old friend looking like a puppet being strangled in his own strings as he stares down at Arnold with a flat gaze that promises he's feeling too much. "You don't get to ask me these things anymore, I'm done for today, I'm going back home to my wife and my kid, this is my day off, man."

"But—"

"You don't get to ask these things," and the anger slips out and then it can't be hidden and that _something_ fills his face and Arnold doesn't think Gerald could hide it even if he were trying to. "You weren't here, okay, you don't… get to read the cliff notes and then give a shit—"

"I do—"

"Shut up!"

The childish tone is painful, and the words are as much an order as they are a plea, and Betsy makes a small noise and shifts restlessly and butts her head against his knees. Arnold cannot manage a response as Gerald glares at him, impossibly young and old at the same time— and then, before he realizes what he's doing, before he even understands what's happening, he asks impulsively, "How's James?"

Gerald's face doesn't change, the hostility and the pain frozen, but something in his eyes, deep—

There is a crack, and a hint of confusion, of the terrible fatigue known only by someone drowning.

Arnold thinks, _this must be what Helga felt all the time while watching me struggle for air._

"I'm going home," is all Gerald says after a long awful moment, and then Gerald is walking away fast, angry stride carrying him easily beyond Arnold's reach as he stares after, frighteningly alert.

In his chest, he can hear the distant echo of someone's drumbeat.

* * *

_Nausea._

_Pain, a heavy horrible pain lurking under the haze._

_"Wake up, Pataki," someone says, and she'd say something back, sure, but she can't even remember words._

_Her eyelids feel heavy, her arms and her legs even heavier, and someone says, "come on, girl" and her body trembles just slightly in response, mind struggling to regain some ability to function._

_She feels, vaguely, like the world is moving under her, and feels smothered, suffocated—_

_"Get up, ball-buster."_

_The world is a blur of gray when her eyes slip open, shifting as she tries to focus, tries to see— another moment of desperate struggle and she can make out a frantic face against the bright blur of the ceiling, Gerald staring down at her with a level of emotion she intends fully to flaunt later—_

_And something moves almost delicately inside her, mind seeming to click into its correct formation and it's buried under the haze, yeah, seems far away and hard to reach but not impossible, nothing's impossible._

_Vague shapes moving around her but Gerald stays close, and now she can see the tension in his face, hear the tremble in his voice when he says simply, "Don't drop out on me again, Helga."_

_There's blood on the collar of his shirt, on his sleeve._

_The ceiling is still moving above her and while she's never been afraid of nonexistence, of finally finding that kind of… peace (she will never admit that "my heart's pretty tired" had been uttered through her tears so many years before, to this day the most painful confession to ever leave her lips) that she is so sure will never fully be in her reach, she has plans, she has made plans, because after all this she is not afraid of living and she does not think there is anything that she cannot survive—_

_Her throat makes a noise, defiant and angry even though the mask, and his laugh is a rough and giddy response._

_Her hand jerks, lifts off the gurney (and she doesn't even know what she's trying to do but whatever it is seems like a good idea), and Gerald is gripping it a moment later, meeting her strength with his own, the following squeeze as much a reassurance as it is a silent challenge._

_"I'll take care of ya," he says as the other shapes pull him away, as they pull her hand from his or his from hers, she doesn't know which is which but it doesn't feel like it matters—_

_And Gerald is gone, and she is alone as she feels her heart pound strong and steady in her chest and the doctors (they are doctors, tight-faced and heavy-eyed as they rush her away) have her._

_This will be (almost) the last thing she remembers of her life._

* * *

Lila still dresses like the offspring of a Scottish dude and a country princess.

After so many years, Rhonda still cannot admit that she finds it endearing.

But still, they have their own little system down, and through the years they have kept to it without problem.

Every morning Lila wakes up herself and then wakes Rhonda up in the process when the shower starts blasting down the hall (Lila seems eternally obsessed with the glory that is Rhonda's unending hot water). There's the clatter of dishes and the beeping of microwave as Lila eats her usual breakfast of oatmeal (at this point Rhonda is always laying stubbornly under her covers like she can force herself back to sleep), and the faint rambling as she checks her bag out loud for all of the supplies she can't let herself forget for work. Then there's the little noise of metal against metal as she pokes her head into Rhonda's room and asks, almost delicately, "What's for dinner?" and Rhonda stares at her blankly from the bed. A couple of seconds will pass, Rhonda trying and failing to murder her by heat vision alone, and then Rhonda will finally (with more thought to what she knows they both like to eat than she will ever admit to having) suggest something. It is accepted ("oh, wonderful!) or rejected (with that pleasant smile that only fools not-Rhonda people and little humming noise of dislike), and Lila says, "Have a good day, Rhonda" and leaves for work once Rhonda lifts one arm to flop it uselessly in goodbye.

But today her roommate heads out a little earlier than normal, something she's been doing every day since they'd gotten the news from Phoebe, and Rhonda knows laying in bed (wide awake even before she'd heard the shower start up suspiciously muted) that she will return from work late. That she will just… hide away in her kindergarteners' empty classroom until the janitor finally kicks her out. There is no clatter of dishes (Lila has taken to stealing her energy bars) or spoken checklist and there is no final visit before work, and she knows that Lila will eat her dinner later with her eyes focused on her uneaten food whenever she thinks Rhonda is too busy working at her laptop to notice her expression.

Rhonda lays there in the quiet until she hears the door close, until she hears Lila's little station wagon (and Rhonda has so many ways that she could kill the stupid thing and get her something better but Lila would _cry_) and then waits for another two minutes before slipping out of bed.

She heads to the bathroom to shower and dress, and is out of the shared home within a half an hour.

* * *

_an: quick update because i had a hellish week and have come back to the next chapters. edited quickly so i'll continue poking at it for the next day but seriously too tired to worry too much. and, no, i can't completely answer a few of the other questions yet, sorry peeps._


	5. four

_clearly i remember  
from the windows they were watching_

_- coldplay_

* * *

**four—**

The journals sit safe in the sanctuary Helga had created for them, and he cannot force himself to dig.

His parents call five, six, seven times throughout the day ("I just wanted to know if you needed anything" now changing into "call us back, son, we just want to make sure you're okay") and he spends most of his time walking and playing with Betsy, and the rest submerged in a life that Helga left behind.

He has already memorized most of the family movies given to him, and keeps a handful of the dozens of pictures they had given him at his side through the day. Helga smiling nervously, hopefully at the camera the day of their graduation, Reba bright and overprotective at her side; a quick shot of Helga walking in the lobby of her store in her manager's uniform, probably only a day or so after finishing her training, her expression warmly sarcastic and the sky outside the window beside her black with night; a small ball of fur held up by Helga in front of a Christmas tree, the blonde woman looking frightened and like she has not the faintest clue of what she's doing as the puppy dangles from her careful grip.

Helga and Lila in front of some restaurant at what he's pretty sure must be Disney World, Lila looking completely out of place in her summer dress and Birkenstocks but the two looking happy together anyway, and too many pictures to count of Helga and Phoebe together, their lives captured and saved through one shot after another, and he has every single picture that Phoebe has of her birthday, and he's found twenty plus birthdays, Helga's life held in his hands as he flips through them restlessly.

Phoebe and Gerald don't seem to have had any pictures with even a glimpse of Olga.

But Olga's pictures are all Helga herself seems to have of her, and he's sure that Helga would have inherited anything she'd left upon her death, and the curiosity is tugging at him again while Arnold watches Betsy attack the food in her dish and dinner defrosts on the counter behind him.

(Helga had become as good a cook as he is the few times he's felt the interest in cooking, and he slowly but surely eats his way through frozen leftovers of casseroles and soup batches, and tries not to wish they could have shared at least one meal _together_, Betsy curled up at their feet as Helga tells him about work the night before and he— he has nothing to share, has not had anything to share in years.)

His phone trembles on the kitchen table a few feet away, screen lighting up, and he's turned the sound down by now, only needs to read the name (DAD) to dismiss the call (he accepts calls only from Phoebe and Gerald has refused to get into contact with him for the past two days so that's only two people).

Arnold wonders what baby James is eating for lunch, and shifts restlessly on his feet, the urge to _search_ so much more painful and freeing than he can remember it being even as a kid.

* * *

_Helga had never even told Dr. Bliss of her abject fear of the dark, back when she had been young and soft and before she had learned to get the hell over it._

_But even years later they are bitter memories she cannot completely let go of, the terror that had filled her when she had been so little that it had been hard to climb onto the dinner table with her sister and her parents (she had found a way, of course, learned to climb skillfully simply because no one had given her the assistance she had needed). The sun would start to go down outside, the lines on the clock would seem to move faster, and then she was being told to go to bed._

_That young, she had still attempted to do what she was told, still vaguely sure it was best._

_But she tried to get her mother to stay in the room with her and her mother would make a quiet noise in the back of her throat, twist her fingers out of Helga's grip and walk out; she tried a handful of times with her father and he barked (his laugh sounded like a dog) and told her that she was fine (she could never get her small hands on him) and closed the door behind him, plunging her into the dark._

_The one time she tried to Olga (and looking back she can understand that there had already been that first simmering anger inside her focused so completely on her sister) and her sister had laughed like she'd been a little silly but kept the door open when she left._

_Useless, though, as her father had shut it only a few moments later when he'd noticed it open._

_Now grown and sharing her bed with a loving but overprotective mix, Helga still keeps a nightlight._

_Tonight James' new sweater is lying in a pile at her side (Betsy's head rests against her other hip, the dog having drifted off to a light doze once she'd been sure Helga was simply doing her usual nightly ritual of lying in the almost dark torturing herself) and right now she's scrolling through her dimmed phone without much focus, thumbing through contacts and reading old messages without thought._

_She has work tomorrow (and a half-dozen meetings with higher managers that like her so much that they hate her) and it's Lila's birthday this weekend (she needs to get the stuff she's going to need to make the cake since Lila always bitches when the cake's not a "Helga cake") and she cannot sleep._

_Not that this is any different than usual._

_Betsy stirs and then settles back down only a moment later, and Helga sets her phone aside and lifts her crochet work from its pile, works a good three rounds before going back to her phone._

_The little nightlight sheds its glow from its own corner, and Helga stares silently at Bob's last three messages, each one more demanding and angry and incoherent than before._

_("She's going to destroy you, Helga, she's going to bring you down with her, she's just like her—")_

_His blood pressure's only gotten worse the last few years, still-thick head of hair long since gone white despite too many attempted dye jobs for even him to deny, and she knows only half of his medication these days is doctor prescribed and right now he's mad at her._

_Not any different than usual— he's been mad at her since he ran out of other things to be mad at, and she can't really remember when the hell that had been if she's honest._

_Helga hasn't seen him since before Miriam's funeral, since after she hadn't fought him on his refusal to let her enter the hospital room the last time, and now he's ranting to her about Olga._

_She sets the phone aside again, stares vaguely in the direction of the nightlight in the corner._

_And he's not completely wrong, and she has work tomorrow, and she needs to go shopping—_

_Betsy twitches, and Helga grabs the phone and erases the three messages before she can rethink._

* * *

There is an air of loss in the newly renovated store where Helga had spent almost a decade and a half of her life working, and if there's a chance that Arnold is making that up, the boss's reaction upon spotting him promises it's not all just in his head.

"You're, her—" he starts, and then hesitates, and Arnold stares back, quite unable to think of a word to offer up as an explanation for what he was to the dead woman he had spent his early life with. "Ah," the older man finishes uselessly, and Arnold shrugs lightly, just as uselessly.

Because by definition he had been nothing, and still is now.

He had never shared a love confession and had never allowed her to have another one, and all of the small moments in school together still mean nothing after his own weakness. He's the husband that isn't, the boyfriend that never got close, and had never allowed even a friendship to grow, not really.

"We were all crazy about her," the man begins as he comes out from behind the counter and guides Arnold without touch toward the lobby. "Maybe the best employee I've had the pleasure of working with." A hint of anger, a spark of muted grief, and Arnold nods carefully, working to stay calm.

A beat as the man blinks, chuckles tiredly: "The scariest, too, but we need that sometimes."

A five year old starts banging her doll against the counter as she demands apple juice instead of orange juice, and Arnold knows innately how simple this kind of stress must have been for Helga.

"—know that she was with us right before her crash."

Wait. "What?"

If the man notices Arnold's startled expression as he shifts straws in the condiment stand and fiddles with the cup lids, he must not understand what it might mean. "She actually left a little into her shift that night, and we got the call an hour or two later that she was in the hospital."

"She was working that night?"

"She was my main closing manager." A grimace as he seems to force his attention away from his vague organizing, swings his gaze to study Arnold with something like suspicion. "You seem confused."

And Helga's boss looks… suspicious, maybe a hint angry.

Protective.

The restless something that's becoming more insistent skitters inside him, nervousness dancing under his skin as he shakes his head easily, tries to brush off the sudden awkwardness between them.

"Do you know where she was heading?"

"Are you family?"

The kindness has left the man's eyes, been replaced with something hard and unforgiving, and the question is ridiculous, the man knows he's not.

"We were… close," he starts, and doesn't get any farther.

"That's not what she told me… Arnold, right?"

Movement out of the corner of his eye and he glances to see a young woman stocking the already stocked condiment stand, attention ridiculously focused on her work. There are a handful of bright purple streaks in her hair, a glint of metal in her nose, and now she's fiddling with the lids.

"Is there anything in particular you wanted to ask me about?"

And there's no reason for Helga's boss to be so suddenly hostile to him, and the girl isn't actually doing anything as she stands too close to the conversation, and she's a terrible eavesdrop.

"I just wanted to see where she worked."

Not a lie, and now the girl's wiping down the already spotless ketchup dispenser, increasingly tense.

"Is there anything else you were curious about?"

Arnold only says, "no," and the man is already brushing past him (the condiment stand is forgotten as the girl quickly falls into step just behind him) to disappear behind the counter with one last nod.

A few feet away the little girl's mashing bits of her food into her doll's face as her father spits increasingly frustrated words into his cell phone and her mother fiddles with her own, and even from this angle Arnold can see the glint of bright colors that promises the woman is playing a game.

The little girl has long since been forgotten, but at least she has her apple juice.

* * *

Gerald doesn't drink often, especially not when he feels like shit (his job is too stressful for him to be so stupid with his own mental health) but he's not working and Phoebe's running errands today and James is with Grandma Reba (and her voice is still breaking almost a month later on Helga's name).

So he's left staring down at the half-full glass of Jack Daniel's gripped loosely in one hand and the basic gold band sitting directly in front of him, and glances warily between the two.

Chest tight with emotion, exhausted despite his best attempts at and his desperate need for sleep, he's been sitting here doing the same thing for an hour now and doesn't have any interest in stopping.

He misses his brother, and he misses his best friend and he misses his other best friend, and Phoebe is still crying herself to sleep most nights, only her impossible durability keeping her going.

Helga's ringtone has been silent for almost a month, and there's a neat indent in his ring finger going on almost ten years, and he doesn't see any reason to process too much of what he's feeling now.

A sensation at his belt, the short vibration of his phone as someone pushes for his attention and it's only because of his wife that he puts down the alcohol to check the screen for Phoebe's name.

Not Phoebe, and he blinks and is uneasy at Arnold's name lit up in blue.

The phone is dropped unceremoniously onto the table, goes quiet after a moment.

His wedding band sits silently in front of him, and his therapist isn't good enough to know when he's lying and it's coming up on his ten year wedding anniversary, and Helga—

A second phone call, Arnold's name and number lit up brilliantly, insistently—

Demanding.

* * *

_Her eyes keep losing focus._

_The hospital bathroom's startlingly quiet just before dawn, and her fingers brush the wet sink in front of her carefully, feeling smooth marble as she focuses on the air moving in and out of her lungs._

_She's never been a big crier ("you were a big crier when you were a baby but only then," she remembers Olga's careless confession years before, unaware of the way the words had rattled Helga) and she can't remember crying very much when Miriam died— and Helga drifts between the two thoughts—_

_It's a weak shelter, the feeling she can recognize as shock after so much therapy, but she clings to it._

_Glances at her reflection warily, and is unspeakably exhausted and burning with energy all at once._

("I know what it's like,"_ skitters through her mind again, the words sounding all too knowing as Gerald looks so quietly, desperately devastated for her, "_and we're all here for you, all of us, you've got your family right here, I promise.")

_And Phoebe is on her way home from her trip to her parents (and she knows with an odd certainty that makes her feel vulnerable that they're coming to visit without question) and Rhonda's running around the hospital throwing money at people (in her strappy heels and business clothes from the night before) and Gerald— Gerald is filling out his paperwork and talking to Olga's neighbors— and her fingers hurt, her knuckles white when she blinks down at her hands on the sink, lost and confused—_

_A murmur of noise, and she lifts her gaze (she cannot help the old flinch in her moment of devastation, the sharp fears never spoken that she had nonetheless banished) to find Lila peering at her worriedly, the woman holding a cup of coffee before her like a silent offering._

_She'd apparently thought nothing of rushing out in one of her ridiculous gingham nightgowns, had showed up in the waiting room with her purse and a warm-looking cardigan as if anybody ever felt cold anymore._

_And it's actually the little jacket Helga had made for her a couple of years before (because Rhonda is obsessed with air conditioning and Lila always feels cold in their home), and it's merino wool with those little pearlescent buttons Helga had found cheap on the clearance rack at the craft store, and something about the sight of Lila's devotion to her gift, as always, leaves her too emotional—_

_And her anger's missing now, left her to the mercy of her heart, and her back is bending because Lila of all people has to strip away the shelter she needs, and she's going blind again—_

_"Helga— oh Helga!" and Lila rushes at her like the crazed and helpless mother hen that she is, the coffee set aside as she flings her arms about Helga in that frantic way that still leaves Helga feeling restless and unsure. "Oh, Helga, oh no, no, no—"_

_Her body returns the embrace before Helga can think about the action and Lila is annoyingly, wonderfully real and Helga thinks, with stark clarity, that Lila has only ever truly attacked one person in her life, in over twenty years, and that had been to defend Helga's honor ("of _course_ you have honor!" Helga still remembers the way the badly-beaten girl had ranted back at her from their place in the girl's bathroom, absolutely awful at fighting but not seeming to care at _all_)—_

_"You have to help me—"_

_Her voice sounds tiny and devastated to her own ears, too much like the one she's never let anyone in the world hear, and her fingers dig into Lila's back, eyes closed tightly against the burn—_

_"Lila," and if her voice fractures here, thins and struggles to return— "Lila, she didn't kill herself—"_

_It is an awful truth, one she feels deep inside where there are still parts of her that hadn't been so destroyed that she had been forced to rebuild them completely, and Olga—_

_Lila pulls back after the awful moment that follows, and the redhead is clearly trying her very best to keep the worry (the "please don't do this") from her eyes._

_But poor Lila's never gained that kind of spine, as poor Rhonda can testify._

_"Helga—" and there is something awful in her voice, in the fear that tightens her face._

_"You have to help me," Helga manages through her tears, and Lila cannot summon a refusal._

* * *

_He can hear her breathing quick and terrified in the almost dark, and there's still a weak strength in the hand locked around his as he tries to move closer to her bed and he can't—_

_"I don't know where I am," and she is crying in a way she never would have been strong enough to before, the hand grasping so uselessly at his trembling but staying strong._

_He cannot reach her, she is next to him and he cannot reach, and she is the weakest she has ever been but she does not let go, short nails catching the skin of his wrist as she cries._

_There is a noise somewhere else (he cannot make it out and it does not matter) but he searches the darkness for her and can find her face, and her eyes are wet and sure as she gazes at him from the hospital bed he is standing right next to but cannot reach._

_He wants to touch her face like he had when Gerald had snuck him in, climb right into the bed with her until she leaves it, but he has her hand and it is enough to hold onto, and he squeezes tightly and now she is crying again, harder than before—_

_A growl (he cannot make it out but it does matter)—_

_She says, "Arnold" and Gerald is grabbing his shoulder, trying to drag him away—_

The quiet rumbling that had started low has become suddenly monstrous.

Arnold is awake before his eyes are open, and the heavy shape on his legs suddenly moves, lunging off of the couch and into the darkness of Helga's house. There's a crash, a shout (someone male and unknown, the sound carrying pain and anger and surprise) and Arnold is on his feet lurching after the dog before the noise registers as anything beyond _wrong_.

He can hear Betsy snarling, her mellow mood turned murderous, and then the sound breaks into a startled yelp, an agonized whine that burns into another stubborn snarl—

Another crash, the sound sudden and impossibly loud—

And he reaches the bedroom, slaps on the light and finds the window shattered, red streaking the sill.

Betsy is half-fighting to jump out of the window after whoever it had been, the dog utterly enraged as she lunges weakly at the wall beneath the window and it takes a moment to understand why she is struggling but only a moment and then he is shaking with his own rage, rushing forward to help her.

The lamp that had been used to beat her lies nearby utterly destroyed.

Outside only Helga's frightened neighbors disturb the night.

* * *

_an: i can finally haz actual vacation. and writing time. i approve this, especially after the so-called summer i've had so far. so go ahead, keep making guesses, it's delighting me and the ten page outline for this beast sitting open in front of me right now, :-)  
_


	6. five

_sometimes solutions aren't so simple_  
_sometimes goodbye's the only way_

_- linkin park_

* * *

_five—_

"They almost killed her."

"She'll be fine."

"Phoebe—"

"Stop worrying," and there's more bite to her voice than Arnold has ever heard.

Something glints in Phoebe's gaze but she doesn't say anything else, dark eyes focused carefully on the dirty tile floor in front of them as Arnold glares at her, unable to control himself any longer.

A half-hour to find a 24-hour vet, another forty plus minutes until he'd carried Betsy (and later he'll realize how… embarrassed the dog had somehow looked over him carrying her around like an overgrown baby) into the vet's office. Phoebe assures him that there's a handful police officer going through the house ("they won't need to go through her things," she'd added unconvincingly when she'd caught the uneasy expression on his face) and that Gerald is coming (and those words make him twitchy, restless, slivers of betrayal he doesn't understand slip-sliding inside him) and that she's sure it had just been some idiot kid.

And there's a dark awful something in the back of her gaze as she sits with her arms wrapped around herself in the uncomfortable chair beside him, her refusal to meet his eyes scraping his nerves.

"Gerald was supposed to be here a half-hour ago."

"He'll be done when he's done," is all she says, and will not meet his eyes.

* * *

Rhonda's always been a fan of sunglasses.

Dark enough to hide her eyes, big enough to make a statement, expensive enough to make it stick.

She wears them more than usual these days but not too much more, since the glasses have become an increasingly close friend of hers and even Helga had given up on getting them off her outside of home.

"Really, Rhonda?"

"You know I wear my sunglasses at night."

Harold squints at her, apparently completely sure that she's insane.

When her only answer is to peer at him fearlessly (as fearlessly as one could hiding behind sunglasses), the sigh he gives is as impressive as any of Helga's old melodramatics as he drops down onto the little public-funded bench beside her. "I could get fired if anybody finds out about this."

"You're going to compare getting fired to this?"

"Says the rich girl."

Says the achingly poor uniform cop just trying to keep his sick mother alive for a couple more years.

If Rhonda feels a pang for her old friend, she tempers it viciously with the stark memory of Lila's muffled crying just down the hall, of Lila's restless pacing in the nights when she's so sure that Rhonda must be asleep. Because Rhonda's not the nicest person, never has been, but Helga had never been perfect either, and god knows Lila has always loved them both.

"I don't even know what's in them," Harold is telling her now, and he's just getting off his shift, is still wearing his black uniform and clearly resisting the urge to grab a cup of coffee from across the street because he needs to get home and sleep even if the bags under his eyes promise that he doesn't sleep much lately. "The only reason I managed to grab it is because Johanssen was out the last few hours—" He catches Rhonda's unhappy grimace, glances at her as she's a beast. "He isn't letting anybody else see any of this, Rhonda, you know how close they were before—" Harold stops, looks down at the envelope in his lap. "You know... before."

Before Helga had left work (even though she never left work early) and crashed on the way home, been killed and left them all... dazed by the sudden absence of her constant movement, her frenzied and so-carefully controlled chaos had left behind for those that loved her.

Rhonda snatches the folder in a moment of emotion, fingers the edges nervously, feeling like an idiot.

"There's a reason Gerald had the car hauled off, Rhonda, you don't want to..."

See what had happened to Helga, the mess that had been left of her car... the mess they had found her in.

None of them want to see it, and Gerald wants none of them to see it and—

And there is something fluttering uneasily in Rhonda, and she knows Lila, she _knows_ her, and even if that fact terrifies Rhonda because she's never been good at the whole... feelings thing...

She trusts Lila, she'd trusted Helga...

"_I want to see her_," Rhonda remembers Lila mumbling into her neck in the waiting room when Gerald had come out to all of them with red-rimmed eyes and a ragged voice the night they'd lost her. "_I want to see her, I want to see her_," and Gerald had shaken his head, refused even Arnold's frenetic demands to let them give her a last goodbye, to see the—

Lila had smelled like the lotion she always smoothed into her hands six times a day, had cried so hard she'd soaked through Rhonda's jacket down to Rhonda's skin beneath— and she had just kept crying until Rhonda had finally half-carried her back to their place and rolled her up in her blankets, sat with her while she slept fitfully into the morning.

"You won't get caught," Rhonda half-states, and almost feels panicked by the thinness in her own voice.

"I only printed out what I could find when the station was empty, and it's his own fault he keeps forgetting to change his passwords when we're all supposed to, so..." There's more than a little bit of guilt in his voice, and he studies her now with something suspiciously close to care in his gaze. "We're all worried about her, you know that, right?"

Rhonda says nothing, they sit awkwardly together—

Then Harold says, "I'm still here if you need me" and Rhonda might shake a little, just for a moment.

Because hilariously enough, Harold knows what she's going through better than anyone else (she can't let anyone else know what she's going through, she really can't, and for reasons that are all her own) and Helga had known, of course she'd known, and she'd also known to keep her damn mouth shut and not pull any of that supporting character nonsense from bad romantic movies.

And now she's sitting here in a damn park in the middle of the night like a damn drug dealer trying to get information she's not supposed to have from her on-again-off-again ex-boyfriend because the closest thing she has to a best friend is now dead and Lila is barely coping and nothing about said best friend's death makes any sense—

She's tired.

That's why Rhonda sniffles a little when Harold touches her hand, sighs and pulls her closer to him.

He smells like police station coffee and convenience store food and for a moment Rhonda takes the comfort she's offered, tilts her head and relaxes against his side and if she sniffles a couple more times, unable to control herself, she almost doesn't care.

"Just don't start sobbing, you know I could never handle that."

Rhonda laughs, chokes on an almost-sob, and Harold pets her like he's not completely sure how to but means it all the same.

It reminds her of Helga's brash and fearless comfort when the two of them would go out to the bar for a night when Lila was too busy planning kindergarten field trips to join them and Rhonda would have too much wine and start feeling... not good.

"Lila is right, you know, to be so..." His whole body rumbles when he talks, big bear of a guy he is these days, and she remembers Lila's skittery nervousness after Olga's death and before Helga had let go of her obsession, her certainty.

… or at least told them she had.

* * *

There's an odd tension under his skin and the sun has long since come up.

Startlingly awake and strung tight with nerves, Gerald oversees the quick investigation of his old friend's house— not just the blood left smeared but the footsteps under the window outside and the interviews with the half-dozen neighbors all wanting to know what the hell happened at dead Helga Pataki's house where the strange blonde man now seems to be living.

But of course... nobody had seen anything beyond the dark shape throwing itself out of the window to escape the dog.

Gerald can't help but wish, for too many reasons, that Betsy had managed to actually keep the bastard down.

But at least whoever it was hadn't managed to get very deep into Helga's bedroom, and Gerald is eternally grateful for that fact as he eyes the carefully protected room that Helga had lived in for years. None of it is foreign (he's been in here enough times since she'd bought the little house years before) and even now that she's been gone for so many weeks, the feel of her remains.

It's a testament to the endurance of her presence that it remains so when she had worked so hard to keep the house impersonal.

No pictures on walls or sticky notes on the fridge, anything personal... tucked away, hidden, protected.

Brave as she had become, she had developed a resistance to the idea of sharing herself in any solid ways.

Gerald knows the reasons for it and still hates it, wishes she'd allowed more pictures to be taken without having to practically force her into the camera's view, wishes she'd... been able to grow even more than she had.

And if that doesn't prove him as an awful person, he knows what else does.

"You're not gonna find anything else."

Gina, behind him, wide awake as only the night owls can be and clearly tired of him keeping them there when there's nothing else they can do. Gerald knows better than to even broach the subject of Arnold leaving the damn house, has already made the calls to keep an officer in a car a few houses down the street for a few days, and wishes that none of this had ever happened.

Not Olga, weak-willed Olga that he cannot help but hate when she's cost them so much, and Miriam and Bob, especially Bob, goddamn Bob with his self-obsessed bullshit and refusal to take care of his own mistakes—

"There's no way you can get this guy to stay in a hotel for a couple days?"

"Nah," he says roughly, and stares at the Ziploc bag with the circular needles and the just-started green afghan that still sits by her bed.

The last time he'd seen her before he'd found her by the wreckage, she'd been knitting it up for Betsy (which usually meant she was actually knitting it for herself but thought the yarn had been too expensive to admit that to anyone) and once he thinks about that—

He weakens in a fragile moment, strides forward and bends to grab it up.

The printed-out lace pattern is folded up inside, Helga's handwritten notes obvious on the margins of the chart.

In the bag with it are another three hanks of yarn, and he knows it's hand-dyed because she'd told them about it during their lunch, Phoebe's warm presence at his side, and she'd done so much work over the years with blues and greens and golds against dark brown. There's splashes of gold in this yarn, he sees now, only now, and he squeezes the bag and stares down at it silently, a little... warily.

Color had become as important to Helga as she had gotten older as words had always been, and without understanding why he thinks about Arnold's painted walls and hallways, the only thing that Arnold had shown even the slightest interest in over the years.

Jungles and rivers that Arnold had lived in for that handful of years, old ruins buried beneath dirt and life and small villages filled with colors and blurry faces— splashes of color Arnold had never had explanations for when Gerald had asked about them.

Plastic crinkles between his fingers and Gerald shudders and breathes and finally nods.

The knitting is sitting in the front seat of his car when they close Helga's door, lock it, and finally start to leave the house.

* * *

Betsy wears her cone with as much dignity as possibly.

He's reaching to gather her up out of the backseat, unworried about the weight of her, when he finally realizes that the front door of Helga's house is opened, that there's someone staring at him from her front step that's not an officer.

(The officer is sitting down the street in his patrol car, Arnold can see him some distance away.)

His father, expression worried and unsure, looking impossibly older than he is.

For a frozen moment, Arnold cannot process how much he hates—

He jerks in a breath, lets it out, looks away from his father and mumbles affectionately to the dog as he lifts her carefully and starts moving to the house. The awful anger's gone, smothered in a fit of desperate control, but he still cannot meet his father's eyes as he carries her inside, sets her gently on the couch.

Betsy looks so far beyond humiliated that it pulls a smile from his face, drags a smothered laugh out of his chest.

Savage warrior dog that she is, she is less terrifying than Helga's heart had ever been.

His father momentarily forgotten, he bends to press a kiss to the top of her head, gives her a quick rub behind her ears.

"I thought Gerald was kidding about the love affair." The wariness in his father's voice is impossibly familiar after the last few years, and the guilt it brings up in Arnold only leaves him more frustrated, overwhelmed. "Your mother and I are both worried about you." Quiet movement behind him, his father edging forward. "You could bring her back to the—"

"I'm staying here." Betsy shifts under his hands, bumps her head up comfortingly into his palm. "I've told you—"

Control stretches, begins to fracture, but his father never pushes now, has given up on pressing.

So it's sudden and surprising, the hard words that come next, "Now look, you can't just stay here, it's not healthy—"

"I haven't been healthy in years." The words come out jilted, awkward, the truth unfamiliar but not unwelcome. "I haven't been able to hold a steady job in three years, Gerald could barely even put up with me... some mornings I couldn't even go get the paper off the stoop." He feels a little like he's suffocating even as the fog is lifting, leaving him vulnerable to the pain that had made him need it in the first place. "I'd rather be miserable here than there."

Depressed, alone, too tired when he woke up in the mornings to do much more than poke at old problems in the boarding house like slow-healing old wounds, prod them just enough to keep them raw but never enough to lance them.

His desperate avoidance has done him no favors.

"Someone broke in and almost killed that dog— Gerald's worried that—"

Arnold tries to ignore the immediate notch of fury inside him, Gerald's infuriating avoidance over the last half-day while apparently tattling the entire damn story to his father— yes, fuck it, _tattling_— "I'm not leaving."

There's a noisy sigh behind him, his father unsure of his standing after so many years, and when Arnold finally allows (forces) himself to glance back, Arnold's eyes drift past his father, skip to the rest of the room.

A fractured image blinks behind his eyes, and though it only lasts a moment, it sears itself deep.

Helga and himself at the kitchen table, talking, just talking over Chinese take-out, Betsy shuffling through the room with a squeaky toy dangling from her jaws, and Helga's wearing pajamas and an old tee, is talking to that other Arnold (this man who did not break himself) and then she's laughing, gesturing down at the knitting sitting by the carton of fried rice as if it's insulted her—

"Arnold."

His father stares at him, and there's a new expression on his face, some terrible... awareness.

"Arnold..."

Behind his father the kitchen table is empty, and there is still no Helga.

There is only Betsy tucked miserably into a corner of a couch and his father staring at him brokenheartedly.

Seemingly fully aware of where his thoughts have strayed.

"I want you to—"

"Don't do this to yourself." There's a focus in his father's voice that half-startles Arnold before he forcefully dismisses it, a hardness in his eyes that almost makes Arnold's will begin to bend. "Staying here torturing yourself isn't going to fix this but..." A momentary hesitation, the older man considering his words, deciding them carefully. "You look sane, Arnold, you look sane, you can..." The bitterness that threads through his voice here is easily perceived, his father's failure filling the room with a sudden awful tension. "We can help you get your feet under you now, you can... you can get healthier again... you can get— get better."

_We couldn't do it, we couldn't, we've failed, but you can do it now, please do it now, please don't abandon us in another way—_

It's an odd feeling, the surge of pity he feels for his parents, and it's fascinating at the same time to consider this man in front of him, to remember all of the... the ideas that Arnold had built around the parents he'd never known. Impossible figures, the ones he'd been left with for the first dozen years of his life, and the distance between them and himself...

He doesn't remember how it happened, cannot think of one particular moment that had cemented his now-familiar bitterness.

Brilliant, his parents, geniuses in their field, and loving parents, they'd always tried, and—

"I'm not going back." He almost doesn't recognize his own voice, catches the flicker behind his father's eyes that promises that he's just as startled by the strength there as Arnold himself is. "Every decision I've made, I've made wrong—" and maybe not every one, not each and every one, but close enough— "and all I have is this house, it's all I have— I can't— I can't be a coward anymore."

"We can help—"

"You really can't." The kitchen table is empty, Helga is gone but she is still in the house, and what is left of him is hers, what is left of her can have whatever is left of him, this is the most he will have and he will not release it now, not when it's all he will ever have.

This promise is the first one he's wanted to keep in too many years to count.

"You really need to go home to Mom." Wariness in his father's face, some heartbreaking hope behind the now-familiar grief that Arnold knows his father is too afraid to let himself feel after the last decade. "I'm staying here."

_With Helga._

Something inside him loosens so suddenly that he wonders how he had never felt the knot itself for the last few years, and he's already moving past his father to grab Betsy her dinner, is thinking about which container of casserole he's going to heat up for his own dinner—

"Don't go with her." Arnold pauses, glances back and finds his father gazing at him with tired eyes and a touch of desperation in his features. "Don't follow her, Arnold, get what you can get from here but don't—" A break in his voice, a fracture of emotion, and he is desperately trying to look like he is sure of himself. "The Green Eyes, you remember what they always said, that life always comes from death, they told you more about their... their philosophy than they ever told us—"

As if Arnold had been capable of understanding any of it, as if it means anything to him beyond some of the paintings he had left on the boarding house walls, as if he can understand anything of their attempts to communicate their myths to him even now—

"Just don't... don't go with her, you don't have to, you can... you can start over again... this... is your second chance."

A sudden thought, a flash of awareness in the back of Arnold's mind— _that's not what they meant when they said that, that's not what they actually said, the words are different, the meaning is different, you don't understand_ and he can remember clearly one of the elderly women of the tribe as she smiles at him from across the beaten earth as she worked quick and easy at her back strap loom— but the thought is gone as quickly as it came, has abandoned him so completely that he then can't remember having it at all.

"Go home to Mom," Arnold tells his father, and just like that the conversation is over.

Arnold turns his attention back to the kitchen, back to the small mission at hand— to care for Helga's dog so that he can go through Helga's room himself, so that he can try to understand the vague and uneasy thoughts he can't form. After a moment there's the sound the front door opening, closing; long minutes later, there's the sound of a car starting, finally pulling away from the house.

* * *

Phoebe's anger is a quiet and vicious thing, and Gerald barely has a defense against it tonight.

He's tired and uneasy, fretful about his oldest friend and increasingly frantic over his closest friend— and the truth is that Helga had become his closest friend, had been his closest friend for years now, and he can't even mark when it actually happened— and the plastic bag that holds Helga's knitting is tucked under the front seat of his patrol car for another day or two.

"What is this?" Phoebe asks him flatly from across the room, and Gerald knows that she's not talking about the take-out he'd brought home to try to keep her from worrying about cooking.

Sitting in his high chair watching them, James' eyes are sharp and careful, less upset than curious about the way his normally-pleasant parents are interacting, have been interacting since Gerald had come home and barely been able to manage a kiss for his wife.

Guilt turns his stomach, and the smell of Thai food is too strong in the small kitchen that's so clearly theirs.

Phoebe's cramped writing and an assortment of family pictures filling the board on the fridge, James' eating utensils drying beside the sink, Gerald's oatmeal sitting out on the counter where he can always grab it for a quick meal before he heads out.

"Gerald."

He hasn't seen her since early this morning, since Arnold had called them so late at night and spit out in a startlingly strong (albeit panicked) voice that someone had nearly killed her (and Gerald's heart had kicked in his chest) and that he had to get her to a vet, she was bleeding, and if Gerald is honest, the hint of panicked rage in his old friend's voice had frightened him just slightly.

Because Arnold's never had a temper, certainly never enough of one to be known for it, but when really pushed beyond his limits he'd always possessed an edge of ruthlessness slightly at odds with his general pleasantness— and that hidden quality had withered as much as everything else in him had for the last dozen years. Even anger, the emotion least likely to ever hold Arnold's attention for long, would have been a welcome sight more than once when Gerald had gone to the boarding house to see his old friend.

But it had been there last night and while he'd been braced for Arnold's hysterical grief in the hospital and for the months following– please god, please only last months— in the face of Arnold's anger Gerald feels small... maybe a little... unprepared.

Add to that Phoebe's exhausted rage, and he's completely at odds with the world around him right now.

"Gerald."

Phoebe's worried now, and only that breaks through the heavy thoughts, gives him the ability to straighten his back and take a deep breath and focus his eyes to meet his wife's squarely. "I can't," he informs her, and watches her face, watches her fingers flex on the kitchen counter. "I can't tell you anything, the case is—"

"Did they kill her?"

Phoebe spits the words out like they hurt to keep them in— he falters— and she jerks her gaze away immediately.

Stares with a pinched face at the wall behind their son's high chair as if it's going to undo the fact that she just asked the question.

"Please don't—"

His wife glances him, a sudden slashing look filled with too many emotions to name, and he quiets, tried to stay calm.

James makes a noise, an irritated little sound that warns his parents that he's grown uncomfortable, and Phoebe moves to him immediately, lifts him up and into her arms. "I'm not in the mood for Thai food," she informs him flatly, and he feels that awful jolt inside him, a sudden spark of panic. "I'm going to call my mom and see what she did for dinner—"

"I'm trying to protect you—"

"Because you did so well with Helga," and her voice has already fractured, his desperately grieving wife with the heavy bags under her eyes and the tight movements that he knows are the clearest sign of her exhaustion. "I begged her," as she grabs the diaper bag off the kitchen counter, as she scoops her keys up— "you promised you would get her out of this—"

"I _tried_—"

"You _lied_," Phoebe cut back and Gerald can feel the movement of the air as she slips past him impossibly fast, disappears down the hallway of their house. "I spent six hours defending you today, six hours, Gerald, and I knew, I'm not stupid, you promised—"

Crying now, stepping into a pair of sandals before she reaches the front door, and then Phoebe is disappearing outside.

All of two minutes, and he knows he won't see her until at least tomorrow afternoon, knows she will refuse any call he might make but that if she stays gone more than a day she'll allow him to visit James without hesitation.

Gerald's hands are shaking, and he cannot completely help but hate Helga, and hate Arnold's refusal to leave the damn house, and the Thai food has long since gone cold by the time Gerald finally manages to force food down his throat.

* * *

_an: i'm not even going to get into the issues i've been going through. suffice it to say, no, this thing is going to be finished, i swear._


End file.
